a well-composed body- anthropomorphism in architecture - 2003

A Well-Composed Body: Anthropomorphism in Architecture

Scott Drake

A Well-Composed Body: Anthropomorphism in Architecture

Scott Drake

A Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of Environmental Design University of Canberra

June 2003

Abstract

Since the writings of Vitruvius in the first century AD, the use of the human body as a metaphorical and symbolic referent has provided what is perhaps the most prolific trope for architectural theory. The image of ‘Vitruvian Man,’ with limbs outstretched to touch the circle drawn from its navel, took on particular significance during the Renaissance, as architects such as Alberti, Filarete, di Giorgio, Colonna, and Serlio published their own interpretations of Vitruvius’ Ten Books. For these writers, the body, as microcosm, was the best available means for representing the order of the cosmos, the world as a whole. Yet just as the idea of the body as architectural referent was being reinterpreted, the body itself was being transformed by Renaissance anatomy. The unity and integrity of the body was jeopardised as anatomists studied the body through the dissection of corpses. The published results of these studies, the most notable being Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica, were highly influential, with the anatomical methods of observation and partition emerging as the fundamental tenets of modern science. Several centuries later, the transformation of the body from a symbol of the world to an object amenable to scientific observation and control was all but fully realised, as the discoveries of Pasteur were put to use in the conquest of disease. These changing medical conceptions of the body led to concomitant transformations of the sense of self, as the body as object was increasingly divorced from the operations of the mind, in both its conscious and unconscious forms.

This thesis will examine how these changing conceptions of the human body have been interpreted within architectural theory since Vitruvius. Beginning with the idea of ornament as trope of sacrifice, it will examine how interpretations of the relation between the body as whole and as part have affected ideas of architectural composition. Further, it will examine the ethical implications of the trope of building as body, such that a building which reflects the proportions of a ‘well-composed’ body (Francesco di Giorgio), is itself an injunction to ‘composure,’ or appropriate behaviour. It will argue that modern architecture, while rejecting classical anthropomorphism, was nonetheless influenced by ideas and practices arising from anatomy. Then, in contrast to the object-body of anatomy, the thesis will examine phenomenological and hermeneutical conceptions of the body, which interpret the body as lived. From Merleau-Ponty’s study of perception to Scarry’s reading of the significance of pain, the contribution of the body to the sense of self will be explored, giving rise to a renewed conception of anthropomorphism as the manifestation not only of human form, but of human sentience. Further, to the modern fragmentation of both the body and architecture will be opposed integrative strategies of selfhood, such as the formation of narrative identity (Ricoeur), the engagement with a community through practice (MacIntyre), and the idea of the ‘monstrous’ body (Frascari). These strategies will be used to explore ways in which the form of the body can be understood other than in purely material terms, and how this is translated into architecture. Frontispiece: Illustration from Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, Book XVIII, Folio 149r.

The Medical Examiner

The Medical Examiner believes and practices the theory of maintenance. He insists that his operating instruments are free of bacteria. He places his favourite scalpels in the disinfectant metal container with the utmost care. He orders the autopsy tables from medical catalogs with a special interest in the details. He visits the factory where they are manufactured. He particularly is interested in the channels at the sides of the marble tables. His excitement increases as he observes the fluid moving into the oval at the end of the slab before the liquids begin their cascade.

The Medical Examiner favours a white stone and brushes it clean by himself after his sectional work is complete. He is disturbed by the increase in fratricides. His greatest sense of pleasure is the moment when the autopsy blade is placed gently, vertically to the outer skin, touching but not quite indenting. At that moment he demands total silence so he is able to hear the sound of his cut, thus commencing another spatial investigation. He marvels at the complexity of the body. He is defeated by his inability to find the soul. John Hejduk, Riga, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal: a work by John Hejduk, edited by Kim Shkapich, New York: Rizzoli, 1989, p. 224.

To Pally and Fred

Acknowledgements

Thanks firstly to my supervisor, Professor Stephen Frith, for the gift of guidance and wisdom that has made this thesis possible.

Thanks to friends and colleagues at the University of South Australia for their encouragement and support during the preparation of the thesis, including Peter Burgess, Rachel Hurst, Stephen Loo, David Morris, Sean Pickersgill, Virginia Lee, Jane Lawrence, Matt Rumbelow, Angelina Russo, Joe Vardon, and Christine Kearney. Special thanks to Rachel for proofreading and assistance with images.

Thanks to many of the members and guests of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand for their helpful comments in relation to papers presented at annual conferences, including Samer Akkach, Richard Blythe, Judith Brine, Mark Cousins, Glen Hill, Michael Hill, Paul Hogben, Andrew Hutson, Mark Jackson, Sandra Kaji+O’Grady, Peter Kohane, Desley Luscombe, John Macarthur, Christine McCarthy, Sam Ridgway, Peter Scriver, Adrian Snodgrass, William Taylor, and Julie Willis. Thanks also to the editors of Architectural Theory Review for accepting earlier versions of material contained herein for publication.

Financial assistance for this thesis was generously provided by an Australian Post-Graduate Research Award administered by the University of South Australia from 1992-94. Support was also provided by the University of South Australia in the form of teaching relief through the Professional Experience Program in semester 1, 2000.

Thanks to staff and students at the University of Edinburgh for their hospitality during my visit, including Iain Boyd-White, Richard Coyne, Mark Dorrian, Adrian Hawker, and Alasdair Dorman-Jackson.

Thanks also to staff and students at the following institutions who provided assistance during an earlier research stage: Melbourne University (especially Alex Selenitsch), University of New South Wales, and Deakin University.

Thanks to Wendy Spurrier of the University of South Australia Library; and to the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh University Architecture Library, State Library of South Australia, the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide and the Flinders University Library.

Contents Preface i Chapter 1 1 Architecture and the Body: Metaphor and Making. Classical Anthropomorphism • The Rise of Science • Science and Architecture • Architectural Bodies • The Body in Sociology • Critiques of Science • Interpreting Architecture • Anatomy of Architecture • The Lived Body • Presentation and Representation Chapter 2 35 Anatomy and Anthropomorphism: Architecture and the Dialectics of Unity Vitruvian Bodies • Sacrificial Bodies • The Body Reborn • The Fabric of the Body • Renaissance Bodies • The Authority of Texts • Science and Method • Character and the French Academy • Respiration and Vital Spirits Chapter 3 86 Evident Virtues: Modern Architecture and the Hygienic Body Disease, Air, and Water • Surfaces of Cities • The Space of Ablution • Counting Bodies, Cleaning Bodies • Embracing Technology • Transparency • The Medical Body • Modern Bodies • From Soul to Self Chapter 4 126 The Lived Body: Architecture as Practice The Theory of Empathy • The Lived Body • Inhabited Space • Tactile Space • An Inner Self • Practice and Narrative Identity • Institution, Memory, and Imagination Chapter 5 164 Monstrous Bodies: Architecture and the Play of Appearance Pain and Pleasure: The Sublime • A Sociology of Artifacts • The Body in Pain • The Architecture of Violence • From Tradition to Revolution • Monstrous Bodies • The Sensory Imagination • Into the Labyrinth • The Play of Imagination • Play as Festival and Symbol Chapter 6 202 Architectural Bodies Bibliography 216

Preface

Just as we think architecture with our bodies, we think our bodies through architecture.

Marco Frascari1

This thesis examines the role of the human body in architecture. In particular, it is

concerned with the way the body is invoked in architectural texts as a model for the design

of buildings. To say that a building is like a body is to encourage forms of architecture that

can be understood through the body, leading in turn to ways of understanding the body

through architecture.

In addressing the role of the body in architecture, the thesis forms part of an extensive

interest in the body as a subject of scholarly inquiry in recent decades, in fields as diverse as

anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy, religious studies, art history

and theory, and gender and culture studies. The body has also been a theme of inquiry in

architecture, with investigations into the long tradition of relating buildings to bodies playing a

major part in architectural historiography. This comes at a time when architectural theory in

general has been moving away from the scientific determinants of modernism, in an effort to

make up for an apparent lack of meaning in the built fabric of twentieth century cities. The

1 Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory, Savage, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991p. 1.

Preface ii

postmodern reaction against this lack of meaning has often focussed upon the mechanisms of

signification, on the role of architecture as a sign. Yet the interest in semiotics is part of the

broader philosophical response to the modernist tradition, the recognition of the essentially

partial and contingent nature of human knowledge. Central to this is an acknowledgement of

the role of the body in the constitution of meaning. In his Phenomenology of Perception,

for instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that instead of being the work of a ‘universal

constituting consciousness’ (Descartes’ Cogito), meaning originates in the actions necessary

for the conservation of life.2 As these actions are elaborated upon, their literal meaning

becomes figurative, leading to the formation of a cultural world. This depends upon the

body’s ability to build for itself what Merleau-Ponty describes as an instrument, an

outward projection of the body in acts of making.3 In order to understand the ongoing

consequences of postmodernity, this thesis explores how architecture can act as an

‘instrument,’ a projection of the body in the constitution of meaning. It does so by revealing

the limitations of regarding the body in purely material terms, and by describing alternative

ways of interpreting the form of the body in architecture.

In Chapter One, the historical appropriation of bodily form is interpreted in the context

of current readings of the body. Through a review of literature from many of the fields

above, it will be argued that the body can and must be understood as an essential part of

any ‘scientific’ attitude to architecture, located as it is at the centre of architecture’s role in

the manipulation of environmental conditions. Ironically, the neglect of the body in

modernism is due in part to the adoption of principles developed through the scientific study

of the body in anatomy and medicine. By regarding a work of architecture as an assembly

of parts, it is possible to relate to the body as a model of composition, and to reflect values

of health and well being that arise when parts work together harmoniously. In Chapter Two,

this metaphor will be seen as being profoundly affected by the dissection of corpses in

Renaissance anatomy theatres. For architects, familiar with the sacrificial origins of their art,

published images of dissected bodies were readily adopted into architecture, with sections

frequently used to present views into the building interior from an external vantage point.

2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 146-147. 3 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 146.

Preface iii

Further advances in scientific knowledge, especially the explanation of the body’s vital force

as a form of combustion, led eventually to a body understood in mechanical terms. In

architecture, this prompted a move away from surface as a representation of internal

character, towards an interest in internal workings, or function. In Chapter Three, a study

of problems of urban hygiene in the nineteenth century will be used to show how forms of

control designed to promote order led to new forms of bodily representation in architecture.

Institutions such as hospitals and prisons became testing grounds not only for practices of

surveillance, but also for methods of ventilation and ablution. Modern architecture’s

fascination with purity, whiteness, and transparency will be seen as part of the broader

promotion of values of cleanliness, and the use of infrastructure to prevent disease by

washing and airing the body.

In contrast to the scientific attitudes to the body characteristic of modernism, Chapter

Four will examine ways in which the body can be considered as more and other than an

object amenable to measurement and control. In particular, phenomenological themes will

be used to show that an understanding of human sensory experience can call into question

the claims to objectivity and universality characteristic of science. Instead, the

phenomenological idea of the body as ‘lived’ serves to emphasise the corporeal nature of

knowledge, and the importance of making as a means of understanding the world. The idea

of embodied knowledge leads to a model of identity as socially or intersubjectively

determined, the outcome of common projects to deal with common needs. By invoking

shared forms of memory and imagination, architecture can give meaning to transitory

experience by making it manifest in lasting and recognisable form.

To further understand architecture as a projection of internal states, Chapter Five

explores the way in which artifacts are used to give comfort to the body, and thereby avoid

aversive sensations of pain or suffering. Using ideas of the sublime, it will be argued that a

complex dialectic of pleasure and pain exists through which the limits of the body are

constantly negotiated as it engages with the world. In this way, artifacts are able to

represent not the form of the body as such, but its formlessness, the depth of its sensory

experience. In architecture, what emerges is an image of the body that is continually

adjusted, a body whose surface acts as a register of exchange between interior and exterior.

Explored through the writings of Marco Frascari, this will be seen to be a body starkly

different from that of classicism. It is instead a monstrous body, a body of surface and

Preface iv

depth, of unity and fragmentation. By revealing what is otherwise concealed from view, the

monstrous body provides an example of what Hans-Georg Gadamer describes as a

‘transformation into structure’.4 This transformation enables artifacts to act as symbols,

giving meaning to transitory experience by making it available for interpretation. As a partial

presence that invokes what is absent, symbols are fragmentary, yet in each lies a promise of

the whole. Instead of an alternative to scientific attitudes, this symbolic function of the body

must firstly be shown as an essential part of any inquiry into the determinants of architectural

form.

4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second edit ion, London: Sheed and Ward, 1989, p.110.

Chapter 1 Architecture and the Body:

Metaphor and Making

Buildings are as useful to our minds as they are to our bodies. John Onians1

Classical Anthropomorphism

What role does the body play in architecture? In physical terms, any building designed

for human habitation responds to the form of the body, taking account of its size and shape,

its manner of movement, and its modes of interaction with the world. In this way, the body

provides one of the major determinants of architectural form. But the body’s relation to

architecture also arises from frequent comparisons made between bodies and buildings. To

say that a building is ‘like’ a body is to encourage an understanding of built form as not

merely responding to, but also taking on, aspects of human form. From this common

rhetorical strategy emerges anthropomorphism, through which a building may transcend the

material conditions of its use to become an artifact of culture. The body thus provides one

of the major sources of both architectural form and meaning, and for this reason has been

frequently referred to throughout architectural theory.

1 John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 3.

Architecture and the Body 2

Reference to the body as a source of form begins with Vitruvius, a Roman architect from

the first century AD. Vitruvius’ writings, gathered together in the Ten Books on

Architecture,2 are the only surviving architectural text from the classical period. Vitruvius’

work is largely a technical manual, combining information on the design of machines and

timepieces along with descriptions of building techniques, in which he sought to complement

practical knowledge of the construction of buildings with theoretical principles to be used in

their design. The principles apply particularly to the design of temples, addressed in Books

III and IV. For Vitruvius, the design of temples depends upon symmetry, which in turn

derives from proportion, the relation of the parts to the whole. The model for both is the

human body:

For without symmetry and proportion no temple can have a regular plan; that is, it must have an exact proportion worked out after the fashion of the members of a finely-shaped human body.3

Vitruvius sought to reconcile the need to imitate the artistry of sculptors and painters with

the need to describe architecture as scientia, which was, especially in the Pythagorean

tradition, a form of knowledge based upon mathematics. This was achieved using the body,

which provided a source of numeric relationships, or proportions, relating part to whole. An

extensive list of bodily features, including face, palm, head, chest, and foot, are connected to

each other and to the height of the body through whole number ratios. And while the parts

are described in proportion to the whole, the whole is described using the two fundamental

figures of square and circle:

Now the navel is naturally the exact centre of the body. For if a man lies on his back with hands and feet outspread, and the centre of a circle is placed on his navel, his figure and toes will be touched by the circumference. Also a square will be found described within the figure, in the same way as a round figure is produced. For if we measure from the sole of the foot to the top of the head, and

2 Citations are from Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura, Translated by F. Granger. London: Loeb Library, 1931. See also Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, Translated by Morris Hickey Morgan 1914. New York: Dover Publications, 1960, and Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (eds.) Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Ingrid D. Rowland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 3 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 3.1.1-2; p. 159.


apply the measure to the outstretched hands, the breadth will be found equal to the height, just like sites which are squared by rule.4

Through this figure, which came to be known as ‘Vitruvian Man,’ the symbolism of the

circle, representing transcendent order, and that of the square, representing mundane or

worldly order, are connected in the body. The body is thus revealed as a worldly

manifestation of transcendent order, reflected in its composition. Although made up of

earthly parts, represented by the square, these are combined in such a way as to form a

unified whole, represented by the circle. For Vitruvius, the body provided a model for

architecture, whose parts were also to be combined to form a unified whole. The source of

that combination was Nature, which Vitruvius described as the source for the architecture of

the Ancients:

In like fashion the members of temples ought to have dimensions of their several parts answering suitably to the general sum of their whole magnitude. Therefore if Nature has planned the human body so that the members correspond in their proportions to its complete configuration, the Ancients seem to have had reason in determining that in the execution of their works they should observe an exact adjustment of the several members to the general pattern of the plan.5

Having described the numerical relationships appropriate for Ionic temples, Vitruvius

goes on to describe those for Doric and Corinthian temples. Here the difference in

proportions, evident particularly in the different columns of these orders, is accounted for

with reference to different bodies. The columns of the Doric temple, based on

measurements of a man, are seen to exhibit “the proportion, soundness, and attractiveness

of the male body.”6 The Ionic, originating in a temple to Diana, exhibited more slender,

womanly, proportions, while the Corinthian column is described as imitating the slenderness

of a young girl. Thus while the figure of Vitruvian Man describes the application of human

form to architecture in general, this finds a particular focus in the relation of body to column.

This relation has provided the foundation for two recent histories of architecture: Joseph

4 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 3.1.3-4; p. 161. 5 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 3.1.3-4; p. 161. 6 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 4.1.4.


Rykwert’s The Dancing Column7 and John Onians’ Bearers of Meaning.8 The

progressive sequence of the orders, writes Onians, “[…] form a colonnade which runs like a

hard spine through the soft flesh of European history.”9 He adds: “Columns carried culture.”

With the persistence of classical forms well into the modern period, the anthropomorphism

inherent in the use of columns has pervaded western architecture. As Rykwert argues, the

analogy between the body and the orders is “deeply ingrained in all recorded architectural

thinking.”10

Although first committed to paper by Vitruvius, the comparison between body and

column is likely to have been a commonplace in Greek culture many centuries earlier.

Based on ideals of bodily form, columns in turn make visible an ‘ideal’ body. Carved in

stone, these ideal bodies also demonstrate qualities of strength, erectness, and disciplined

regularity that were desirable in persons, in particular those responsible for the maintenance

and defence of the Greek state.11 “The Greeks”, writes Onians, “may well have dreamt of a

phalanx that held together like a temple.” For Vitruvius, proportion also had an expressive

function. The reason for adopting Nature’s rules was to show that those rules were being

obeyed, and therefore that architecture was in harmony with the natural order. The body

provided a visible metonym of Natural or cosmic order, a microcosm, the middle term in a

three-fold metaphor of building-body-world.12 Following the rules of Nature was one way

to ensure appropriate appearance, or decor, described in Book I. While proportion was

for Vitruvius a means of grounding architecture as a form of knowledge, or scientia, its use

ensured appropriate expression. Through decor, Vitruvius relates architecture to that which

is fitting or appropriate to do, to decorum, as described in works of ethics and rhetoric by

Aristotle and Cicero.13 As classical architecture was adopted throughout Europe during the

Renaissance, the expressive function of the orders remained significant. By then the use of

classical forms also provided a connection to tradition and authority, complemented by

7 Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. 8 Onians, Bearers of Meaning. 9 Onians, Bearers of Meaning, p. 330. 10 Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 29. 11 Onians, Bearers of Meaning, p. 8. 12 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: pp. 61-69; pp. 373-374. 13 Onians, Bearers of Meaning, pp. 36-40.


reference to the authority of the Vitruvian text. By the sixteenth century, writes Onians, the

choice of orders was used as an expression of status and morality, character and emotion.14

The Rise of Science

With the European Renaissance, and the interest in classical forms and texts that it

entailed, the body was to remain a fundamental focus of architecture. The orders were used

extensively in virtually all European architecture from the Fifteenth Century onwards, while

theoretical works on architecture were invariably new editions or re-interpretations of

Vitruvius. These works gave currency to classical ideas of anthropomorphism. Yet the

interest in the body at the time was more than architectural. The Renaissance marked the

beginning of the Humanist period, characterised by a rejection of religious doctrine in favour

of secular values, and celebrated through an effusion of creative and scientific endeavour.15

On the one hand, the human form became the subject of extensive sculptural and pictorial

representation. On the other, there arose a belief in the powers of the individual, in terms of

creativity, and of reason and observation. Those who studied the physical world began to

discover variance between their observations and the tradition of knowledge inherited

through the church. The idea of a universe described by number and geometry remained,

but the conception of mathematics changed from a representation of transcendent order to

an internally consistent set of rules independent of human value, a ‘mechanisation’ of the

world.16 Initially characterised by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, science

emerged as an independent, secular discipline, whose influence was extensive. As a form of

knowledge, science came to dominate academies of learning throughout Europe, as its

modes of investigation, description, and communication set the standard for all other fields of

inquiry. More importantly, science, made manifest through technology, provided a means

for the instrumental manipulation of the world.17

14 Onians, Bearers of Meaning, p. 4. 15 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, fourth edition, London; New York: Academy Editions: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. 16 Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, translated by C. Dikshoorn, London: Oxford University Press, 1961. 17 The sense of ‘technology’ addressed here is informed by Jacques Ellul’s characterisation of it as realised technique, being any of the means and methods of achieving efficiency. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson, New York: Vintage, 1964.


In architecture, adoption of the principles of science and technology led eventually to the

emergence of Modernism, based upon an ideology of ‘function.’ Use of the orders, like

ornament in general, was rejected in favour of an aesthetic derived from pragmatic, formal,

or technical issues. In this way the symbolic content of architecture, its role as a

manifestation of a transcendental dimension, was replaced by purely instrumental concerns.

This has been described by Dalibor Vesely as constituting a ‘conflict of representation.’18

Conceived originally as a unity of instrumental and symbolic function, of techne and poiesis,

architecture’s role was one of representing reality as a whole. This was rendered

problematic as modern science sought to replace symbolic with instrumental representation,

regarding precise, mathematical descriptions of reality as preferential to the ‘indeterminate

and vague’ descriptions of traditional symbolism.19 But by describing only that which is

susceptible to mathematical understanding, science constitutes only a partial representation

of reality.20 The shift in representation constitutes a ‘conflict,’ argues Vesely, because of the

different objectives of symbolic and instrumental representation. He writes: “While the

former is reconciliatory and serves as a vehicle of participatory understanding and global

meaning, the latter is aggressive and serves as an instrument of autonomy, domination and

control.”21

Efforts made to reconcile architecture with the principles of science resulted in what

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, after Vesely, has described as a ‘functionalization’ of architectural

theory, purposely avoiding all reference to philosophy or cosmology.22 During the early

eighteenth century, architects at the École Polytechnique, most notably Jean-Nicolas-Louis

Durand, sought to teach architecture as a science, based upon formal principles designed to

18 Dalibor Vesely, “Architecture and the Conflict of Representation,” AA Files 8, Spring 1985, pp. 21-39. See also Dalibor Vesely, “On the Relevance of Phenomenology,” Pratt Journal of Architecture 2, 1988, pp. 59-62; Dalibor Vesely, “Architecture and the Poetics of Representation,” Daidalos 25, September 15, 1987, pp. 22-36. 19 Vesely, “Architecture and the Conflict of Representation,” pp 20. 20 That science is independent, non-representational, is, he writes, ‘one of the greatest misconceptions of modern times.” Vesely, “Architecture and the Conflict of Representation,” p. 24. 21 Vesely, “Architecture and the Conflict of Representation,” p. 22. 22 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983, p.4. “Once it adopted the ideals of a postivistic science, architecture was forced to reject its traditional role as one of the fine arts. Deprived of a legitimate poetic content, architecture was reduced to either a prosaic technological process or mere decoration.” p. 11.


facilitate composition.23 Deprived of its symbolic dimension, those aspects of architecture

that were not instrumental were, like art in general, relegated to the realm of subjectivity.

This was the domain of aesthetics, the effect of sensation or pleasure, of bodily experience

not connected to reason. This split, between the objective domain of science and the

subjective domain of art, was problematic for architecture. In the eighteenth century,

architects such as Etienne Louis Boullée sought to reconcile the split by resorting to the

formalist aesthetics of Rationalism, the ordering of experience through relation to the pure

geometry, form, or mass of the architectural object.24 This task continued throughout the

nineteenth century as the role of architecture became the expression of an idea rather than

that of forming a connection to history or tradition. The expression of ideas ‘appropriate’

for the time, initially manifest as a choice between styles, shifted eventually to the expression

of technology, and the focus upon architecture’s ‘internal’ determinants of function, materials

and construction. With the emergence of Modernism through the Deutscher Werkbund and

the Bauhaus, architecture was thoroughly pervaded by the ideology of science. Issues of

health and hygiene formed a major part of the Bauhaus curriculum, with Hannes Meyer and

Oskar Schlemmer making frequent reference to medical texts in their lectures.25

Science and Architecture

As the culmination of the influence upon architecture of science, aesthetics, and

technology, Modern architecture was largely devoid of anthropomorphism. Through both

the rejection of ornament and the move away from the normative model of Vitruvian Man,

the orders lost their place in architecture. The body was no longer needed as an

intermediary term for explaining the world, nor as a source of measure and proportion:

number and meaning were both to be found in science and technology. Somatic metaphors

were rejected in favour of mechanical ones, typified by Le Corbusier’s characterisation of

the house as a ‘machine for living in.’ Thus Modernism rejected the Humanist body in

23 See also Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980. 24 Vesely, “Architecture and the Conflict of Representation,” pp. 26-28. 25 Christina Flötotto, “Building the new, hygienic, healthy man in modern architecture: Freidrich Wolf and the ‘Neues Bauen’,” EAR 27, September 2000, pp. 87-99.


favour of the abstractions of a mechanised world, a world of Newtonian science, dominated

by natural and mechanical forces. Yet behind those abstractions, another type of body can

be discerned. This is the body liable to instrumental control through the ‘technology’ of

architecture, functioning to provide what Reyner Banham called the ‘well-tempered’

environment.26 New configurations of form and space made using new materials of

concrete, steel and glass were heavily dependent upon the mechanical manipulation of

environmental conditions. This was especially so as a style of building developed in Europe

was promoted as ‘International,’ applicable irrespective of local climatic or cultural

considerations.

Figure 1: Illustration from Banham, Architecture of the Well Tempered Environment , p. 53, showing

ducting in a school in Michigan, taken from the Sturtevant Catalogue, 1906.

26 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. See also Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: The Architectural Press, 1960.


For Modernism, active means of environmental control were an essential part of the

utopian vision of freedom from the vicissitudes of nature. This was made possible by a small

number of inventions made in the late nineteenth– and early twentieth centuries, especially

air-conditioning, elevators, and electric lighting and power.27 These inventions enabled

regular and reliable provision of light and temperature controlled air, dramatically improving

both living and working conditions of industrialised cities. Through active environmental

control, architecture promised a cure for the insanitary and often dangerous conditions of

factories and urban housing. The separation of combustion from the site of its application

made possible by electricity removed the problems associated with energy use, such as the

lack of oxygen, the accumulation of smoke and soot, and the danger of fire.28 And the

provision of water supply and waste disposal virtually eradicated the epidemics of

contagious disease that swept through urban populations.29 Modernism, through its use of

plumbing and electrical services, promised safe, clean, and healthy cities. In this way, the

‘body’ for Modernism was one that would operate efficiently through the provision of

adequate amounts of energy, air, and water: a body, in other words, mechanically

conceived. It is a body whose needs can be satisfied, a body that can enjoy previously

unimaginable levels of comfort. Yet that comfort can also be regarded with suspicion, as an

extension of the capitalist control over labour, stabilising the workforce to ensure maximum

efficiency.30 The application of scientific principles of prediction and control to the

workplace and it occupants is indicative of the aims of democratic capitalism to maximise

investment return by minimising risk. One consequence of this instrumentalism is the

reduction of work from a ‘calling’ or profession to that of a ‘career’ that can be directed

toward individual achievement.31

27 On the rise of active systems of environmental control, see Cecil D. Elliott, Technics and Architecture: the Development of Materials and Systems for Buildings, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. 28 David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990; David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. 29 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, London: Faber and Faber. 1994. 30 Tomás Maldonado, “The Idea of Comfort,” in Victor Margolin, and Richard Buchanan, (eds.) The Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, pp 248-256. 31 On the idea of a ‘calling,’ see Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991. On the idea of ‘career’ in relation to architecture, see Stephen Frith, “Competent


The use of scientific and technological principles in architecture was inspired not only by

the works of the Modernists, but also by the system of education developed at the Bauhaus.

Here the teaching of architecture moved away from both the traditional apprenticeship

system and the atelier system of the École de Beaux-Arts to adopt a more technical

curriculum, more closely aligned with engineering than with fine arts.32 As the teaching of

architecture moved into universities around the world, this model proved attractive, enabling

architecture to demonstrate a rigour that would gain the approval, if not the status, of the

natural sciences.33 One way to do so was to describe that field of study dealing with the

manipulation of environmental conditions as ‘architectural science.’ Often explored in

dedicated laboratories, this became a fundamental component of most departments of

architecture in universities throughout the Western world.34 As well as active means control

light and air, the ‘science’ of architecture also addressed the performance of new building

materials (especially glass), as well as related systems such as sunshading, for effecting

environmental control. For many architects, these ‘passive’ means of modifying internal

environment were crucial determinants in the choice of building geometry and materials.

Taking advantage of ambient energy to create comfortable spaces was one of the primary

functions of architecture, from which ‘form’ would naturally follow. Unfortunately, many of

the buildings built under the name of Modernism were made with little understanding of these

techniques, instead relying heavily on mechanical systems. Eventually, problems associated

with energy use became apparent. The energy crisis of the 1970’s highlighted in economic

terms the excessive reliance of industrial culture upon fossil fuels, just as ‘green’ movements

were beginning to identify the damage caused to the natural environment by industrial

production.35 This spawned an interest in ‘low-energy’ architecture, reliant on passive

rather than active techniques, which has since expanded to include issues of ‘sustainability,’

or ‘environmentally friendly’ architecture.

Qualities: The Problem of Virtue in Architectural Education,” in Desley Luscombe and Steve King (eds.), Aspects of Quality in Australian Architectural Education, Sydney: Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 1995, pp. 5-15; pp. 10-11. 32See Spiro Kostof (ed.), The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 33 Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. 34 Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (eds). The Architecture of Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 35 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.


Like any form of science, the science of architecture aims to predict, and therefore to

control, particular physical or material aspects of the world. In architecture, what is

controlled is the space enclosed by buildings, in order that it be suitable for human

habitation. Despite the focus on building materials or performance, these are only of interest

to the extent that they affect the body and its senses. Thus the science of architecture may in

fact be regarded as a science of the body. Yet, like much of modern science, reference to

the body is limited, hidden beneath layers of quantification. Through psychrometrics or

anthropometrics the body is reduced to a series of numeric requirements that can be met

through the technology of architecture. These quantifications, rather than acting

metonymically for the body, in fact substitute for it, thereby precluding the body from further

consideration. Thus the scientific nature of modern architecture, although very much about

the body, is in part responsible for the elimination of the body from architectural discourse.

Architectural Bodies

In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, much of architectural theory has been

characterised by a reaction against the excessively technological nature of modernism, and

the loss of urban amenity associated with the demolition of ‘historic’ buildings. The planning

of cities began to be interpreted from the point of view of its inhabitants, rather than as a

purely technical issue. Beginning with Gordon Cullen’s Townscape, a range of works

sought to address the embodied experience of moving through cities as a pedestrian.36

Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture also rallied against the

impoverishment of urban experience by modernism, and instead promoted an architecture

amenable to multiple interpretation.37 Christopher Alexander’s work on ‘patterns’ sought to

bring together a range of embodied experiences as the basis for a mathematical or linguistic

36 Gordon Cullen, Townscape, London: Architectural Press, 1961. See also Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978; Kevin Lynch, Good City Form, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981; Rob Krier, Architectural Composition, London: Academy editions, 1988. 37 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.


model of design.38 Meanwhile Geoffrey Broadbent argued that the human sciences, rather

than natural sciences, provide the appropriate foundation for architecture.39

One direct attempt to re-examine the significance of the body in architecture saw it as a

means to mediate between architecture and the human sciences. In Body, Memory, and

Architecture, Bloomer and Moore applied psychological studies of perceptual schemata,

especially that of ‘body image,’ to the experience of built space.40 For them, the ‘objective’

descriptions of space inspired by Cartesian geometry were inadequate, and needed to be

replaced by a conception of space ordered by the body. The presumed commonality of

embodied experience was for them a way to overcome the problem of subjectivity raised by

aesthetics. “[I]t is impossible” they wrote, “to imagine a spatial organisation more universal,

more valued, and more immediately understandable to everyone than the one provided by

the human body.”41 For Bloomer and Moore, architecture enacts on a larger scale the

processes of establishing identity through the body, thus allowing them to be shared by

members of a household or community. It makes manifest the social nature of the body’s

‘emotional spatiality,’ its connection to place through memory.42

More recently, a series of publications have continued to explore the implications for

architecture of the many diverse interpretations of the body currently available. A collection

of essays, titled Body and Building, demonstrates the ongoing interest in applying bodily

themes to the interpretation of architecture from the classical to the contemporary.43 The

body has also been used in readings of key architectural texts, such as Francesco Colonna’s

38 Christopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977; Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. 39 Geoffrey Broadbent, Design in Architecture: Architecture and the Human Sciences, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1973. See also Jon Lang, Creating Architectural Theory: The Role of the Behavioral Sciences in Environmental Design, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1987. 40 Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. On ‘body image,’ see Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, Princeton, N.J: Van Nostrand, 1958; or more recently, Seymour Fisher, Development and Structure of the Body Image, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986. 41 Bloomer and Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture, p. 46. 42 Bloomer and Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture, pp. 45-46. “Body spatiality, by contrast, refers to an internal world which is not only distinct from and within an external world, but which is centered around ‘landmarks’ and bodily memories that reflect a lifetime of events encountered outside the psychic body boundary.”


Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.44 The sixth in the series of the ‘Any’ conferences, Anybody,

bringing together architects and cultural theorists, sought to investigate what non-literal ideas

of the ‘body’ might mean in architecture.45 Installations and performances by Diller and

Scofidio provided new interpretations for the architectural body,46 while the body also

formed the basis for studies of gender and sexuality in architecture.47 Some works provide

a means for practicing architects to describe the way in which their work responds to the

body, 48 while others use the body as a means of interpreting the work of architects, such as

Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and Bernard Tschumi.49 Architecture also provides a

way in which studies of vision in modernity50 might be extended to include the body in its

multi-sensory experience.51 In short, a renewed consideration of the body has been one of

the primary means by which architects and architectural theorists have sought to overcome

the problems associated with the scientific and technological nature of modern architecture.

43 Robert Tavernor and George Dodds (Eds.) Body and Building, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. [The publication date of this anthology prevented it from being given full and proper consideration in the present thesis.] 44 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: the Strife of Love in a Dream, translated by Joscelyn Godwin, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. The authorship of the Hypnerotomachia has been recently disputed, with some authors attributing the work to Alberti: see especially Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-cognizining the Architectural Body in the early Italian Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. 45 Cynthia Davidson (ed.), Anybody, New York; Cambridge, Mass.: Anyone Corp.; MIT Press, 1997. 46 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes; Georges Teyssot, The Mutant Body of Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. 47 Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, Carol Henderson (eds.), Architecture and Feminism: Yale Publications on Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996; Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, Leslie Kanes Weisman (eds.), The Sex of Architecture, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996; Joel Sanders (ed.), Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996; Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Sexuality & Space, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 48 Scott Marble et al (eds.), Architecture and Body, New York: Rizzoli, 1988. 49 Arie Graafland, Architectural Bodies, Edited by Michael Speaks. Rotterdam : 010 Publishers, 1996; Michael J. Ostwald, and R. John Moore, Disjecta Membra: Architecture and the Loss of the Body, Sydney: Archadia, 1998. 50 For example, Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993; and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Ninteenth Century, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. 51 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, London: Academy Editions, 1996.


The Body in Sociology

These architectural interpretations can be seen as part of a wider interest in ‘the body’

as a subject of inquiry in the late twentieth century, inspired largely by the writings of Michel

Foucault. Foucault’s first publications focussed upon institutions where individuals were

separated from society because of a perceived deviation from a position of normality. 52 In

asylums and hospitals, deviations in mental and physical health were judged by state-

appointed experts, men of medicine whose knowledge was applied ostensibly for improving

the welfare of both the individual and the population as a whole. For Foucault, these

‘dividing practices’ showed the way in which knowledge is used in order to effect

subjection, that is to give control over individuals through the constitution of the subject. The

isolation and treatment of affliction reveals the embodied nature of that subject, the way in

which the body provided the medium through which power-knowledge was exercised. This

point was further emphasised as Foucault later extended the study to military and penal

institutions.53 On the one hand, minute control of gesture and movement in the discipline of

soldiers, and on the other, violent acts of punishment against criminals, show the way in

which power is ‘written on the body,’ that is, made manifest in the gestures of the individual.

This provides a dramatic extension to Marcel Mauss’ observation that habits of bodily

movement, care, and consumption are acquired techniques.54

Architecture’s complicity in the exercise of power through institutions is made

particularly evident by Foucault in his study of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ prison. The

geometry of a darkened central tower encircled by back-lit cells makes the prisoners visible

to the guards, but not vice-versa. The architecture creates a condition of surveillance

whereby the prisoners, lacking evidence to the contrary, must assume that they are

constantly under inspection. In this way, the prisoners internalise the principle of

52 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Vintage Books, 1975; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard, London: Tavistock, 1967. 53 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; translated by Alan Sheridan, second Vintage Books edition, London: Allen Lane, 1977. 54 Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, London; Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.


surveillance, governing their own conduct in anticipation of being observed.55 The

Panopticon exemplifies the way in which architecture, through the control of spatial and

visual hierarchies, facilitates the exercise of ‘bio-power.’ Although most obvious in the

radial plan, surveillance strategies are also in place in other institutions. With the hospital, for

example, gathering together the sick in one place enabled them to be subjected to the ‘gaze’

of clinical medicine. Isolating patients facilitated observation and measurement, allowing the

collection of data that led to statistical approaches to pathology. In similar ways,

surveillance can be seen to operate in any social space where order is imposed, including

schools, offices, factories, and even domestic environments.56 As a realised version of an

intended or desired order, architecture can thus be seen as a manifestation of power

relations.57 Foucault’s interest in the relationship between knowledge and power was

further developed in his studies of the human sciences, bringing into question both the

ordering and application of knowledge in fields such as linguistics, biology, and economics.58

Through Foucault, ‘science’ appears less as an abstract study of the physical world, and

more as a means of sanctioning particular forms of discourse and behaviour.

Foucault’s work has inspired the adoption of ‘the body’ as an explicit subject of inquiry

in a variety of fields, especially sociology. Bryan Turner, for example, has argued that

instead of the abstractions of structure, class and function, ‘the body’ should lie at the centre

of sociological analysis. 59 Following Foucault, Turner suggests that the problem of order in

society is a problem of the ‘government’ of the body. He writes: “Every society is

confronted by four tasks: the reproduction of populations in time, the regulation of bodies in

space, the restraint of the ‘interior’ body through disciplines, and the representation of the

55 Foucault, Discipline and Punish; see also Paul Q. Hirst, Foucault and Architecture, Sydney, Australia: Local Consumption Publication, 1984. 56 Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. 57 On architecture as a manifestation of power, see also Thomas A. Markus, Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types, London; New York: Routledge, 1993; and Kim Dovey, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, London; New York: Routledge, 1999. 58 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock Publications, 1970; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock Publications, 1972. 59 Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, Oxford; New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984.


‘exterior’ body in social space.”60 In this way, Turner combines Marx’s characterisation of

the body as both the vehicle and the site of labour with Foucault’s ideas of the ordering of

the body to argue that embodiment plays a fundamental role in all social action. Shared or

imposed ideals of identity and behaviour combine with the needs of the body to dominate

our everyday life, “involving us in a constant labour of eating, washing, grooming, dressing,

and sleeping.”61 The government of the body is a task undertaken at an individual as well as

at a societal level, manifest in practices through which are determined issues of production

and consumption, health and disease, gender and sexuality, family and self. Turner’s work is

just one example of a range of studies addressing the significance of the body within

sociology.62 The body has also been a subject of inquiry in various fields, including art and

art history,63 feminism,64 geography,65 philosophy,66 and cultural studies.67 The body has

been one of the key topics of postmodernism,68 especially as it provided common ground

for multi-disciplinary conferences and publications.69

60 Turner, The Body and Society, p. 38. 61 Turner, The Body and Society, p. 37. 62 Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, London: Sage, 1991; Chris Schilling, The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage Publications, 1993; Anthony Synnott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society, London and New York: Routledge, 1993; Pasi Falk, The Consuming Body, London: Sage Publications, 1994; Simon J. Williams and Gillian Bendelow, The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues, London; New York: Routledge, 1998. 63 Andrew Benjamin, (ed.), The Body, London: Berlin: Academy Editions; Ernst & Sohn, 1993; Melissa Harris (ed.), The Body in Question, New York: Aperture Foundation, 1990. See also the journal Theory, Culture and Society, of which Turner was an editor. 64 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 1994; Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the Body, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 65 Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity, London; New York: Routledge, 1996; Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile (eds.), Places Through the Body, London; New York: Routledge, 1998; Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place, London; New York: Routledge, 1994. 66 Donn Welton (ed.), The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999; Donn Welton (ed.), Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998; David Michael Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism, London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. 67 Stephen Kern, Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975. 68 Carl A. Raschke, Fire and Roses: Postmodernity and the Thought of the Body, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. 69 Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, (eds.), Zone 6: Incorporations, New York: Urzone, 1992; Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (eds.), Zone 3-5: Fragments For a History of the Human Body, New York, NY: Cambridge, Mass.: Zone; MIT Press, 1989; Michael Feher and Sanford Kwinter (eds.), Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City, New York: Urzone, 1987.


Critiques of Science

While many of these studies represent a reaction against the simplifications of the body

by science, they in fact originate in attempts to bring the study of human endeavour more in

line with natural science. Only with Romanticism was there a direct opposition to scientific

knowledge. Against the fragmentation of reality brought about by the rationalism of

Descartes and the positivism of Comte, the Romantics sought a reunification of man with

nature. In particular, they celebrated the idea of ‘perfection in unity,’ and of access to it

through those dimensions of the world unaccounted for by science; love and beauty, sensory

experience and imagination.70 In architecture, the romantic quest for unity with nature found

its way through the Arts and Crafts movement to provide a form of Modernism more

aligned with nature than technology. Particularly evident in the architecture of Alvar Aalto in

Finland and Frank Lloyd Wright in America, this has recently been described as

Modernism’s ‘other tradition.’71 While still influential, this tradition has since been

complemented by critiques of modernity from other fields. As well as political critiques,

originating largely in the Marxist writings of the Frankfurt School,72 alternatives have also

arisen from structuralism and semiotics, as well as from phenomenology and hermeneutics.73

Most of these fields arose as part of the effort to raise the human sciences to the level of the

natural sciences. In particular, they addressed the question of human understanding, in part

as a means to overcome the divide between rationalism and empiricism. In the late

nineteenth century, Ferdinand de Saussure studied the way in which language was able to

convey meaning, coining the term semiotics for this science of the ‘sign’ in linguistics. In the

twentieth century, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied Saussure’s principles of

70 Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 5-6. 71 Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project, London: Academy Editions, 1995. 72 These include Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976; and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. On the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.


language to the interpretation of cultural practices in order to explain kinship structures in a

more ‘scientific’ manner, resulting in the field of structuralism. Similarly, Friedrich

Schleiermacher originally adopted the method of hermeneutics from theology as he sought to

discover more accurate modes of interpretation, intended to prevent misunderstanding.74

Later, Wilhelm Dilthey argued that the interpretation of the human sciences through

hermeneutics constituted a fundamentally different form of knowledge from the explanation

of the natural sciences. As part of his attempt to raise philosophy to the level of a science,

Edmund Husserl adopted the term phenomenology (used earlier by Hegel) for the study of

the way in which ‘phenomena’ present themselves to the mind. Husserl regarded European

Science as being in a state of ‘crisis,’ lacking an understanding of the essential nature of

things; he called instead for a return to ‘the things themselves.’75 Following on from Husserl,

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, examined the nature of the

conditions prior to knowledge, and upon which knowledge depends.76 Critical of science,

he regarded it as merely a secondary explanation of the world and our experience in it. The

‘thing’ to which Merleau-Ponty returns is the body, exploring its primary position among

objects, its status as that which enables other objects to be perceived: “The body is our

general medium for having a world.”77

In his major work, initially dedicated to Husserl, Martin Heidegger employed

phenomenological methods of analysis to the interpretation of Being, thereby developing an

ontological hermeneutics.78 Like Husserl, Heidegger was critical of rationalist modes of

knowledge, regarding science as only one particular kind of knowing available to ‘Being’.

Perhaps in order to avoid Cartesian dualism, Heidegger did not use the body as an explicit

theme of his work, although it is implicated in his characterisation of Being as ‘being-there’

(Dasein). In exploring the modes of knowledge available to Being, Heidegger began with

73 Jonathan A. Hale, Building Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Theory, New York: John Wiley, 2000. 74 Hale, Building Ideas, p. 216. 75 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated with an introduction by David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 76 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, passim. 77 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 146. 78 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.


the common phenomenological theme of the use of tools. Tools provide an instance of the

use of ‘equipment’ (Zeug) through which the body interacts with the world, as we engage in

projects or ‘dealings’ in that world.79 “The kind of dealing which is closest to us” writes

Heidegger, “[is] not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern that

manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’.”80

Equipment is known actively, not conceptually; it is an embodied knowledge, a ‘primordial’

relationship between the body and those objects that are seized hold of and put to use.81 In

relation to our Being (Dasein), equipment demonstrates a mode of being that Heidegger

calls ‘readiness-to-hand’.82 This ‘readiness’ also characterises the spatial relationship

between objects and the body, as the region in which equipment presents itself to Being.83

The hermeneutical critique of scientific knowledge was further developed by Hans-

Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger. In his ironically titled Wahrheit und Methode

(Truth and Method), Gadamer is critical of the limited notion of understanding permitted by

science, arguing that scientific method fails to live up to its claims of universality.84 In its

concern for truth as verifiable knowledge about objects and their properties, science

neglects the domain of understanding that arises from the interpretation of texts. Gadamer’s

work is an inquiry into truth as it arises in fields outside of science, such as theology,

literature, law, and art, and into the ways in which that truth comes to be understood.

Significantly, the modes of truth arising through interpretation go beyond the objective,

disinterested, truths claimed by science, requiring instead an active engagement between

subject and object, between reader and text. This engagement is particularly evident in the

experience of a work of art, which, writes Gadamer, “[…] has its true being in the fact that it

[…] changes the person who experiences it.”85 The kind of truth that ‘comes to

appearance’ through interpretation is a truth beyond that of methodological knowledge, a

79 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 97. 80 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 95. 81 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98. 82 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98. 83 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 135-138. 84 “The hermeneutic phenomenon” writes Gadamer, “is basically not a problem of method at all.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. xxi. 85 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 102.


truth “in which one must try to share.” 86 As an ‘interpretation’ of interpretation,

Gadamer’s work explores the philosophical significance of hermeneutics. Although it moves

beyond the phenomenological questions of the relationship between body and objects, the

notion of active engagement, explained using the notion of ‘play’, suggests ways in which

embodied experience may be intrinsic to interpretation, understanding, and truth.

With the works of both Heidegger and Gadamer, we see how the original attempts to

bring rigour to the human sciences evolved into a fundamental critique of the natural sciences

to which they originally aspired. Interestingly, phenomenological and hermeneutical critiques

of science were occurring at the same time as the truth conditions of science were being

challenged from within. Throughout the twentieth century, philosophers and historians of

science have brought the claims of science into question by exploring the processes of

scientific discovery. Imre Lakatos87 and Karl Popper88 began the challenge to the truth

conditions of science, suggesting that a valid theory was merely one that had not been

disproved or ‘refuted.’ Thomas Kuhn extended this idea into a study of the ways in which

scientists shift epistemological frameworks, or ‘paradigms,’ in response to new theories or

discoveries.89 Paul Feyerabend challenged the notion of ‘method’ altogether, arguing that

many scientific discoveries arose in spite of, and not because of, systematic practices of

inquiry.90 Others, most notably Bruno Latour, examined the conditions for the production

of scientific knowledge, arguing that claims to objectivity are deeply problematic in light of

the social dynamics of the laboratory.91 For Latour, the social dynamics of scientific

knowledge are also active beyond the laboratory, as argued in his study of the adoption and

86 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. xxiii. 87 Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: the Logic of Mathematical Discovery, edited by John Worrall and Elie Zahar, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. 88 Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 4th edition (revised), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972; Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson, 1972. 89 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. 90 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, third edition, London: Verso, 1993. 91 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979; Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987; Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988.


dissemination of the discoveries of Pasteur.92 More recently, Joseph Rouse has interpreted

the dynamics of scientific knowledge and practice based upon the writings of Foucault.93

Interpreting Architecture

These various challenges to the dominance of science and technology have been

influential in the constitution of architectural theory in the late twentieth century. Along with

sociological, political, and structuralist readings, sections on phenomenology and

hermeneutics have appeared in many recent anthologies and summaries of architectural

theory.94 One of the first to present a phenomenological view of architecture was the

Norwegian historian Christian Norberg-Schulz, who described the importance of celebrating

‘place’, in contrast to the modernist conception of ‘space’.95 Norberg-Schulz regularly

applied ideas from Heidegger to readings of architects such as Jørn Utzon, Carlo Scarpa,

and Louis Kahn.96 Similarly, Karsten Harries has proposed a Heideggerian interpretation of

the making of place as an expression of the ‘ethos’ of its inhabitants.97 And recently the

architect Steven Holl has adopted a phenomenological approach in the production and

explanation of his work.98

92 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988. 93 Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand its Practices Philosophically, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996; Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. 94 See, for example Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, New York: Routledge, 1996; Kate Nesbitt (ed), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996; K. Michael Hays (ed), Architecture Theory since 1968, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998; and Jonathan A. Hale, Building Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Theory, New York: John Wiley, 2000. 95 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1980; see also Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965. 96 Christian Norberg- Schulz, “Kahn, Heidegger and the Language of Architecture,” Oppsitions 18, Fall 1979, pp. 28-47; Christian Norberg- Schulz, Architecture: Meaning and Place, Selected Essays, Rizzoli International Publications, 1988. 97 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. 98 Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, Tokyo: a+u publishing, 1994.


Of particular interest here is the application to architecture of Gadamerian hermeneutics

by Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne.99 In contrast to natural-scientific models of

design as a ‘process’ or ‘method,’ derived from a logical positivist conception of language,

Snodgrass and Coyne describe design as hermeneutical, subject to processes of textual

interpretation.100 “Design is an interpretive activity, one of understanding a design situation

rather than of solving a problem.”101 After Gadamer, the designer is seen to encounter each

situation already equipped with ‘prejudices,’ deeply entrenched assumptions, expectations,

and interpretive practices which allow an initial meaning to be established. The situation is

also prefigured, presenting a ‘context’ of interwoven physical and cultural aspects that will

influence the outcome, from site and programme to construction techniques and regulatory

controls. The design emerges as the designer engages in a dialectical exchange with that

context, allowing the mutual influence of both to be explored. The designer’s initial

preconception or ‘projection’ of what the design might be enables the various dimensions of

the context to be understood, which in turn act to reconfigure that preconception. This

brings into question the designer’s own prejudices, which may then be readjusted, thus

giving rise to a new projection. The design progresses as the relation between part and

whole is developed through reciprocal exchange. This is an instance of the ‘hermeneutical

circle,’ the movement between part and whole fundamental to all acts of interpretation,

where each is reconfigured in light of its influence upon the other. The ‘circling’ between

part and whole of that which is interpreted is also a ‘circling’ between past and future

understandings, a mysterious process of recognising that which is new.

With the hermeneutical conception of language, the preconceptions, or ‘fore-structures,’

which are brought to interpretation, are also active in acts of perception. When we sense

99 Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, “Is Designing Hermeneutical?” Working Paper, Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney, 1990; Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, “Can Design Assessment be Objective?” Architectural Theory Review, 2/1, April 1997, pp. 65-97; Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, “Hermeneutics and the Application of Design Rules,” working paper, Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney, 1991; Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, “Hermeneutics, Objectivity and Design Evaluation,” working paper, Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney, 1991; Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, “Models, Metaphors and the Hermeneutics of Designing,” working paper, Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney, 1991; Richard Coyne, Adrian Snodgrass, and David Martin, “Metaphors in the Design Studio,” Journal of Architectural Education 48/2, November 1995, pp. 113-125. 100 A description of computational models of design can be found in William J. Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1990. 101 Snodgrass and Coyne, “Is Designing Hermeneutical?” p. 14.


something, by seeing an object or hearing a speech utterance, understanding of that thing is

immediate, already implicated in the sensing if it. “In sensing a thing, we sense it as

something.”102 This is in contrast to logical positivist models of language, for which

perception and meaning are regarded as independent events.

“When we see something, we see it not as a meaningless object to which we only later, and as a subsequent action, attach a meaning, but rather as something that we immediately, and coincident with the seeing, see as something already meaningful. The act of seeing something is an act of recognizing it, of understanding it as what it is.”103

Moreover, if something is not yet understood, or if we choose to enrich our understanding of

something beyond its present meaning, it is possible to understand it as something else. This

is the domain of metaphor.104 Seen in this way, metaphor is not merely a linguistic trope,

but is fundamental to all acts of perception and interpretation. What lies at the basis of

understanding through metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is embodied

experience.105 As the body and its sensorimotor capacities interact with objects, forces,

and space, fundamental concepts are established which then form the basis for further

comparison. The experience of force and resistance, orientation and movement,

containment and connection, number and distinction, balance and reciprocation, are first

understood through the body. Then patterns from one domain of experience can be

projected onto another, perhaps a more abstract or distant domain, in order to structure

meaning. Many of these concepts, while taken for granted, can be seen to derive from the

embodied nature of metaphor: affection as warmth; more as up; categories as containers;

intimacy as closeness; understanding as seeing or grasping.106

102 Snodgrass and Coyne, “Is Designing Hermeneutical?” p. 9. 103 Snodgrass and Coyne, “Is Designing Hermeneutical?” p. 9. 104 See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, translated by Robert Czerny; with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. 105 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books, 1999; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 106 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, pp. 50-54.


With architecture, metaphor can be seen to pervade our understanding of the ‘process’

of design as well as the thing being designed. Design itself might be regarded as mysterious

or creative, as a journey or as a search, as a solution to problems or response to

constraints.107 That process may also involve the application of particular metaphors,

regarding, say, a house ‘as’ form or function, circulation or habitation. It could also involve

an intentional play of oppositions, inverting or challenging dialectics of inside/outside,

structure/servicing, front/back, or public/private.108 Through this hermeneutical

understanding of design, the importance of part and whole and the operation of metaphor,

several questions arise. Firstly, what kinds of metaphors are appropriate for architecture?

Are some metaphors more appropriate than others? Given the prevalence of

anthropomorphism in architecture, it should be apparent that one significant metaphor is that

of ‘building-as-body.’ While this metaphor is no longer operative in the same way as used

by classical and renaissance architects, is the metaphor of ‘building-as-body’ still a valuable

one? If so, what kind of body would or should that metaphor be based upon? The

conception of the body has, as we have seen, been dramatically reconfigured since the

Renaissance, suggesting that Vitruvian Man is no longer an appropriate referent for

architecture. But are there other conceptions of the body by which architects can give

meaning to their work?

Secondly, there is the question of what is meant by ‘part’ and ‘whole’ in architecture. In

physical terms, the parts might be regarded as the physical elements out of which the

building is constructed, such as pieces of timber, glass, or stone, whose connection,

expressed in detail, gives meaning to the whole.109 Alternatively, the parts could be

understood as the various systems, of structure, servicing, and circulation, which work

together to form the whole. The parts might also be regarded as the series of energy and

fluid dynamics, of heat, light, sound, and air, which make spaces suitable for human

habitation, and the whole being the sum total of the sensory experiences of those spaces.

The parts could be understood narratively, a series of events in the lives of the inhabitants as

they open a door, feel the warmth of the sun through a window, or gather together with

107 Coyne, Snodgrass, and Martin, “Metaphors in the Design Studio,” p. 115. 108 Coyne, Snodgrass, and Martin, “Metaphors in the Design Studio,” pp. 116-120.


friends to share a meal; the whole, then, a series of collected memories of those events. The

parts could also be understood compositionally, as a series of patterns in plan, elevation, or

section that go to make up the whole as an aesthetic unity. What these possibilities reveal is

that the nature of ‘part’ and ‘whole’ itself depends upon the metaphoric conception of

architecture; architecture as physical, technological, ecological, phenomenological, narrative,

or aesthetic artifact.

Taken together, these two questions give rise to a third, namely, to what extent is the

conception of part and whole in architecture determined by the metaphor ‘building-as-

body’? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand ‘science’ not in terms of the

worldviews of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, but through the ‘scientific’ views of the

body in medicine. It is via medicine, the art and science of healing the body through an

understanding of its inner workings, that conceptions of the body become available for

translation into architecture as anthropomorphism. The body provides a model of unity, as a

necessary and sufficient combination of parts working together to maintain human life. With

western medicine in particular, the body has been the subject of modes of inquiry which

sought, following Aristotle, to understand the working of the whole by understanding the

working of the parts. Yet for Aristotle, the purpose of understanding the parts was so that

the function of the whole could be understood. For Aristotle, the body functioned as the

vehicle of that vital or living force known as the soul (anima).110 The question of what

constitutes a whole body up to and including the Renaissance necessarily included the soul.

However, since the Renaissance, western medicine has been concerned primarily with the

idea of a body functioning in its own right as a living organism, the proper subject of

anatomy and physiology. Through increasingly detailed studies of the working of the body,

from Vesalius, to Harvey, to Pasteur, the history of medicine reveals changes in the

conception of what constitutes a properly functioning body.

109 Edward R. Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture, two volumes, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990; 1996. 110 Aristotle, On the Soul, translated by W. S. Hett, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935; 415 b, pp. 87-88.


The idea of the body as a model of unity has an ancient pedigree. As Mary Douglas has

observed, the idea can be applied to any bounded system.111 While the boundaries of the

body delimit it as an entity, those boundaries are vulnerable, liable to incursion, especially at

times of the transgressions necessary to sustain the body. With both the ingestion of food

and the elimination of waste, the body is liable to pollution, a corruption of its internal

order.112 This threat gives rise to shared rituals and practices in relation to food and waste,

which in turn form the basis for the representation and interpretation of other social

structures. Through ritual, social order is made visible in and through the body, such that the

two are symbolically interconnected.113 Thus rituals describe how threats to the bounded

system, whether bodily or social, are to be avoided or amended.114 And just as the

experience of the body is extended outward to social structures, so too social structures are

made manifest in experience. Ritual provides a way to demonstrate that transgression of the

social order have been corrected through atonement. If the ritual is successful, the

transgression has been healed.

“[R]ituals enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expression they enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the human body.”115

One such ‘ritual’ involves the identification and treatment of those bodies that have

succumbed to the threat of corruption, bodies regarded as less than whole by virtue of

affliction by illness. To regard the domain of illness in symbolic terms is of course to counter

111 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. 112 See also Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerson Buchanan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. 113 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 115. “The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The function of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva, and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.” 114 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 121. “[A]ll margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. [...] The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual’s attitude to his own bodily and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural and social experience.”


once again the ideology of science, as manifest in the perception of modern medicine as

scientific. But as Susan Sontag has argued, the perception of diseases such as cancer and

AIDS are heavily laden with metaphors of moral corruption.116 Similarly, Roy Porter,

following Douglas, has described conceptions of the body and its sicknesses as social as

well as biological, thereby shaping the practice of medicine.117 Porter writes:

“What is considered normal health and what constitutes sickness or impairment are negotiable, and the conventions vary from community to community and within subdivisions of societies, dependent upon class, gender, and other factors. Maladies carry different moral charges. […] Bodies are thus languages as well as envelopes of flesh; and sick bodies have eloquent messages for society.”118

Concepts of sickness and health demonstrate historical variation, due not only to

changes in knowledge about the body, but also to changes in the way in which that

knowledge is interpreted. The study of medicine is instructive in understanding how

scientific knowledge becomes used, both practically and metaphorically, especially as ideas

about health and well being are mapped onto society as a whole. Medicine is also

instructive because, as Foucault has shown, the treatment of sickness in individual bodies

becomes the province of society in general, in order to control the threat posed to other

bodies.

Anatomy of Architecture

The influence upon architecture of the medical conception of the body begins with the

rise of anatomy during the Renaissance, the exploration of the parts of the body through the

dissection of corpses. Anatomy demonstrations were carried out in theatres across Europe,

and publications of anatomical illustrations were among the first printed books. As Sawday

has argued, an interest in ‘partitioning’ arose in various cultural endeavours at the time, all

115 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 128. 116 Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. 117 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: Medical History of Humanity From Antiquity to the Present, London: Harper Collins, 1997. 118 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 36.


based upon the model of the body.119 The influence of anatomy was so pervasive, he

suggests, that the Renaissance can be regarded as a “culture of dissection.”120 Anatomy

gave rise to a new conception of bodily unity, based upon the partitioned body, with its inner

workings revealed. Thus ideas of body interiority and spatiality were reconfigured, as these

were either visible from the exterior, or made manifest on the surface or skin. Moreover,

the processes of anatomical inquiry, of partitioning the body and laying out the parts across a

table, were to become the model of scientific inquiry in general, forming the foundation of

‘method’ as described by both Bacon and Descartes. In Chapter 2, the influence of

Renaissance anatomy will be explored through the work of architects such as Leon Battista

Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and Sebastiano Serlio. For these architects, the

influence of Vitruvius was challenged by the new anatomical conceptions of the body. The

dissected body provided a model not in terms of correct proportion, but in terms of the

visibility of inner states, as the interior, as a correctly functioning combination of parts

ordered in space, was made manifest on the surface.

The second major influence for architecture, more than three centuries later, occurred

with the development of bacteriology around the discoveries of both Pasteur and Koch.

This was significant, firstly, because it enabled the knowledge of anatomy to be put into

practice through surgery. Combined with the development of anaesthetics that had

overcome the problem of pain, germ theory gave rise to sterilisation techniques that

prevented post-operative infection. Prior to this, surgery had been low on the medical

hierarchy, restricted to the treatment of surface conditions.121 Now, however, surgeons are

able to enter the body, as if it were a corpse, to restore order to the body interior. The

second significance of germ theory lay in the fact that it was preventative. The

development of immunisation gave relief from the epidemics of diseases such as typhoid and

cholera that had swept through urban Europe. Yet germ theory was also pervasive in its

reconfiguration of practices of bathing, dress, and domestic hygiene. Growing medical

knowledge of the mechanisms of contagion led to new standards of cleanliness, which in turn

119 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, London; New York: Routledge, 1995. 120 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, pp. 2-3. 121 The exception was military surgery, dealing as it was with a captive audience; with great advances made by surgeons such as Ambroise Paré. See Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 188-190.


engendered new types of social behaviour. In particular, the avoidance of disease led to a

shift from atmospheric to hydraulic practices of hygiene, with the result that vision was to

replace smell as the measure of salubrity. The use of water for domestic and bodily hygiene

was promoted by ‘Purity movements’ throughout the nineteenth century. These movements

undertook the self-appointed task of cleaning the entire social body, with the call to moral

reform poorly disguised in scientific language. Teaching new practices of bathing and dress

were seen by their members as a means to rid cities of disease, dirt, and vice.

Chapter 3 will explore the influence upon modern architecture of Pasteurian medicine.

In Paris in 1919, Le Corbusier’s held an exhibition of paintings in association with Amedée

Ozenfant that was to mark the beginning of the ‘Purist movement.’122 The accompanying

catalogue, Après le Cubisme, intended as the movement’s manifesto, describes a purity of

mechanisation and standardisation, a purity derived from number and geometry, as

fundamentals of art and science. Yet in the choice of the title, Le Corbusier reveals himself

as one of the major protagonists in bringing the values of hygiene to architecture. His manual

of the dwelling in Towards a New Architecture reads like a manual of hygiene, while the

plan for the Radiant City was based in large part on the avoidance of disease through the

provision of fresh air and sunlight. In his characterisation of the machine-house, Le

Corbusier, like most modern architects, sought to come to terms with the provision of

services to meet with the new demands for washing. At the 1928 CIAM conference, the

determination of minimum requirements for dwelling, or existenzminimum, necessarily

included plumbing. In his essay titled “Plumbers,” lamenting the poor bathing practices of his

fellow Europeans, Adolf Loos equated bathing with culture.123 In the same way, it was in

the pursuit of culture that Loos sought to cleanse the ‘body’ of architecture through the

rejection of ornament.124 The use of new materials of glass and concrete, while representing

the adoption of new technology, also enabled cleanliness to be demonstrated. Concrete

was frequently painted white, giving the appearance of a freshly cleaned surface, and glass,

while easy to clean, also provided a visible reminder of the water used for cleaning. More

122 Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, pp. 206-213. 123 Adolf Loos, “Plumbers,” translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave, in Nadir Lahiji and D. S. Friedman (eds.) Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, pp. 15-19.


importantly, the transparency of glass enabled a new level of visibility into the interior, thus

turning architecture into an instrument of surveillance. In these ways, architects sought to

emulate the status of the medical profession through the control of urban populations,

thereby making the values of medicine manifest in the architecture of modernity.

The Lived Body

By posing questions about metaphor and about part and whole, hermeneutics emerges

as more than simply an alternative to the ‘scientific’ approach to architecture. Instead it

reveals that modern architecture is dependent upon the metaphor of the body, albeit a body

conceived in ‘scientific’ terms through medicine. This leads to one further question, namely,

how might understandings of the body in phenomenology affect the architectural metaphor of

‘body-as–building’? That is, in moving beyond the ideology of modernism, are there

metaphors of the body other than those provided by science – especially of the body as

lived – that are able to inform the interpretation of architecture?

The question arises not only because of the significance of anthropomorphism, but also

because of the importance of the body in both phenomenological and hermeneutical critiques

of science. One of the major problems identified by that critique is the separation of mind

and body that began with the Cartesian Cogito. Rather than the conception of body and

soul as interrelated in both classical and Christian belief, Descartes implied a separation of

the two by distinguishing the world of objects (res extensa) from the world of ideas (res

cogitans).125 For Descartes the place of reason was the mind, located at a point within the

body, rather than permeating it. Thus the body was relegated to the world of objects, with

the mind, not the body, being the proper domain of philosophical inquiry. The split enabled

the body to be appropriated by medicine as an object amenable to manipulation, at the

same time as it promoted a view of knowledge and its application as independent of the

body. This resulted in claims to objectivity, since identified by feminist and postmodernist

critiques as serving to conceal power relations based upon embodied differences such as

race and gender. It also resulted in a disembodied conception of identity, an internalised

124 Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897-1900, translated by Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982.


view of the self that was also appropriated by medicine through the fields of psychology and

psychiatry.

An essential part of phenomenological and hermeneutical critiques of science is the

attempt to overcome the separation of mind and body since Descartes, and to rediscover

the role of the body in the constitution of knowledge. In Chapter 4, the influence upon

architecture of embodied conceptions of identity will be examined through the metaphor of

the lived body. The idea of the lived body has been explored by Merleau-Ponty, who

described the way in which understanding arises from perception, through the interaction

between body and world. “[M]y body is a movement towards the world, and the world my

body’s point of support.”126 For Merleau-Ponty, the surface of the body appears as a

‘radical discontinuity,’ across which spatial and object relations change. In contrast to the

modernist conception of surface as an impediment to vision, Merleau-Ponty regards surface

as a site of exchange between self and world necessary for their mutual constitution.

Surface exchange is also significant within hermeneutical models of selfhood. Paul Ricoeur

acknowledges the temporal and linguistic dimensions of experience in describing ‘narrative

identity’; Charles Taylor acknowledges the engagement with everyday projects of

production and reproduction in his affirmation of ‘ordinary life’; and Alasdair MacIntyre

describes the involvement in ‘practice’ as crucial to the determination of self in virtue ethics.

For these authors, identity is not merely an interior state, but arises as a result of the ongoing

exchange between internal and external determinants, between body and world, between

self and others. Interpreted through the metaphor of ‘body-as-building’, these conceptions

of self give rise to new possibilities for differentiating between interior and exterior, for

regarding surface as a register of the ongoing exchange between the two. With Louis

Kahn’s concept of the ‘institution,’ built form emerges from the innate human desire to

gather together. By providing a place for people to meet, architecture becomes an

expression of the convergence of individual and social needs. With Aldo Rossi’s celebration

of the theatrical dimension of architecture, the city emerges as both a stage for human events

and as a site for the embodiment of narrative structures, invoking their recollection through

125 Rene Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, London, Cambridge University Press, 1967, p. 221. 126 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 350.


memory and imagination. Both can be seen as a reinstatement of architecture’s role as a

record of human events, a transformation of the body into the monuments of the city.

Presentation and Representation

One further critique of the modernist view of the body as a material object, amenable to

strategies of domestication and disclosure, rests upon an interpretation of the violence

inherent in these acts. Anthony Vidler’s description of the experience of interior states as

‘uncanny’ acknowledges the lived body as both familiar and unfamiliar.127 While the familiar

dimension of sensory experience is reduced through the provision of comfort, the unfamiliar

dimension of the body interior is accentuated through its appropriation by medicine and

psychology. In the architecture of Libeskind and Eisenman, and in the writings of Tschumi,

the focus on violence against the body reminds us of its susceptibility to pain. In recognising

the capacity for pain and suffering, the lived body can be seen as characterised not only by

the sensory experience described by Merleau-Ponty, but also by the meaning given to

sensation through its effect upon the body. In the work of Elaine Scarry, this capacity,

described as sentience, is implicated in all acts of making.128 For Scarry, the expression of

interior states, motivated by the desire to prevent pain, is enacted as the ‘projection of

sentience,’ the making of a world that is sympathetic to our capacity for pain. In this way,

‘anthropomorphism’ is less an imitation of human form than a making of objects that are

mindful of the body as lived. In this way, acts of making help to overcome the vulnerability

of the body by extending its capacities outward into the world.

This remaking of the world is also done in anticipation of the forms of incorporation

necessary for sustaining the body. As Bourdieu has identified, questions of taste in regard to

material artifacts originate in the necessary discernment associated with food.129 In the

127 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992; Anthony Vidler, “The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture,” AA Files 19 (Spring 1990): pp.3-10. 128 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 129 “[…] one cannot fully understand cultural practices unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavours of food.”


work of Marco Frascari, anthropomorphism is explored through the dialectic of expression

and incorporation.130 For Frascari, the lived body comes to understand the world not by

merely incorporating things into itself, but by making things out of itself and transforming itself

into them.131 Such transformations require a ‘productive’ search for correspondences

between things, dealing not with abstractions, but with the material reality of the world, and

how it can be shaped to satisfy the needs of the body. The role of architecture, as a

productive art, is to foster happiness, to facilitate the ‘beatific’ life. The productive search

for correspondences involved in acts of making helps to overcome the fragmentary, or in

Lacan’s terms, ‘morsellated,’ nature of sensory experience. Unlike Lacan’s mirror,

however, artifacts do not provide a unified image of the body. Instead, the image of the

body is constantly transformed as new correspondences result from the conceiving of

‘inconceivable’ unions. For Frascari, the body revealed in this way is ‘grotesque’ or

‘monstrous,’ always in a process of becoming, its limits or boundaries constantly negotiated

as they interact with the world.

Chapter 5 will explore the idea of anthropomorphism as an expression of the body not

as static form, but as a constantly changing series of interior affective states that are

projected outward as artifacts. These artifacts give rise to the hermeneutic possibility of

meaning being mutually developed through the interaction between objects and the body.

This interaction can also be explored through the idea of play. This originates in Kant, who

described aesthetic experience as a ‘play’ or ‘free-play’ between the faculties of imagination

and understanding necessitated by the absence of a concept.132 Johan Huizinga regarded

play as the characteristic human activity, more fundamental than the ability for reason or

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice, London: Routledge, 1984, p. 1. 130 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, passim. Frascari also explores the analogy of gastronomy and architecture in “Semiotica Ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education, 40/1, Fall 1986, pp. 2-7. See also Frascari, “Take as Much You Please of Some Unknown Material,” unpublished article; October 2, 2001 (http://www.waac.vt.edu/material/takesome.html), and Frascari, “Architects, Never Eat Your Pasta Without a Proper Sauce! A short anti-Cartesian meditation on the nature of architectural imagination,” unpublished article; June 11, 2001 (http://www.waac.vt.edu/material/pasta.html). 131 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, pp. 49-50. 132 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952; §9, pp. 57-60.


making.133 For Gadamer, the absorption of play is used to describe the experience of a

work of art, itself typifying the active engagement that is central to hermeneutical

interpretation. Gadamer describes the play of art as always a ‘presentation’ for someone,

such that the play ‘comes to presence’ or ‘presents itself’ as a result of the player’s

absorption. Through presentation, play is opened out to an audience, with the result that

they are drawn into the play, and become part of it. This is particularly evident in the

theatrical play of appearance, which is one of the four types of play described by Roger

Caillois.134 Here gestures are altered to suggest that a different character is being presented

through the body. Combined with the ‘interplay’ of body and objects, this leads to an

‘object hermeneutics,’ through which artifacts engage with the body in the expression of

character. It is this form of ‘presentation,’ it will be argued, that informs the use of

anthropomorphism in architecture.

133 Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, translated by R.F.C. Hull, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. 134 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, translated by Meyer Barash, New York: Free Press, 1961.

Chapter 2 Anatomy and Anthropomorphism:

Architecture and the Dialectics of Unity

The whole of (social) space proceeds from the body, even though it so metamorphoses the body that it may forget it altogether—even though

it may separate itself so radically from the body as to kill it.

Henri Lefebvre. 1 Vitruvian Bodies

As the oldest surviving architectural text, Vitruvius’ Ten Books has provided a

foundation for all subsequent architectural theory. Of all the contents of the text, it is the

description of a body circumscribed by circle and square that has become the most

recognisable element of Vitruvian theory. Our image of this figure, of ‘Vitruvian Man,’

comes to us not from the original Ten Books, received as it was without illustrations. It

comes instead from the many versions drawn during the Renaissance, by architects such as

Cesare Cesariano, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and of course, Leonardo Da Vinci.

Although a common rhetorical trope, Vitruvius’ comparisons between body and building

gave rise to an image that, according to Rudolf Wittkower, haunted the imagination of

1 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991, p. 405.

Anatomy and Anthropomorphism 36

Renaissance architects.2 Since then it has come to represent Renaissance humanism, and

the importance of the body of man as both a manifestation of cosmic order and the source

of immense creative powers. The idealised physique of Vitruvian Man provided a source of

proportion and composition that enabled architects to impart a measure of divine perfection

to their work.

But there are other bodies to be

found in Vitruvius. There are the

bodies of the first humans who

discovered fire and began to build

shelter, whose upright stance and

dexterous hands distinguished them

from savage beasts.3 There is the

body of the architect, whose hands

and mind provide the craftsmanship

and technology necessary for good

design.4 There are the gendered

bodies of the orders; the masculine

Doric, the feminine Ionic, and the

‘maidenly’ Corinthian.5 There is the

‘body’ of knowledge that an

architect requires, bringing together

a scientific and a liberal arts

education. Countering the possible

objection that the variety of subjects needed to be studied by an architect is too large,

2 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, fourth edition, London: Academy Editions, 1988, p. 14. 3 Vitruvius De Architectura, 2.1.1-9; pp. 77-87. 4 Vitruvius De Architectura, 1.1.1-18; pp. 9-25. “He should be a man of letters, a skilful draughtsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music; not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsultants, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.” p. 9. 5 Vitruvius De Architectura, 4.1.1-12; pp. 203-211.

Figure 2: Woodcut from Cesare Cesariano’s edition of

Vitruvius’ Ten Books, Como, 1521. (As published in

Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 89.)


Vitruvius argues that they must be perceived as interconnected, “For a general education is

put together like one body from its members.”6 And finally, there is the body susceptible to

excesses of heat and cold, to the injurious effect of moisture, or threatened by the pestilential

breath of marsh animals.7 The choice of site for any building, according to Vitruvius, is

primarily a matter of salubrity, avoiding dampness and foul winds.8 To understand the

healthiness of a site, the reliability of its food and water supply, Vitruvius recommends ‘the

old method,’ the ancient practice of sacrificing animals found grazing in the area and

inspecting their livers (haruspication or hepatoscopy).9 In Chapter 6 of Book 1, the layout

of the streets of any city is said to affect the health of its inhabitants. Streets may be

arranged so as to exclude unpleasant, infectious, and injurious winds, allowing a ‘smooth

and thick air’ to develop, nourishing and refreshing those who are healthy, and expediting

the cure of those undertaking medical treatment.10

For Vitruvius, healthiness comes from the relationship between a body and its

environment, mediated by what he calls ‘natural decor.’ In Chapter 2 of Book 1,

architecture is described as consisting of the following: Order, Arrangement, Proportion,

6 Vitruvius De Architectura, 1.1.11; p. 17. 7 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.4.1-8; pp. 35-41. 8 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.4.1-8; pp. 35-41. “In the case of the walls these will be the main points:–First, the choice of the most healthy site.” 9 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.4.9; pp. 41-43. “Therefore emphatically I vote for the revival of the old method. For the ancients sacrificed the beasts which were feeding in those places where towns or fixed camps were being placed, and they used to inspect the livers, which if at the first trial they were livid and faulty, they went on to sacrifice others, doubting whether they were injured by disease or faulty diet. When they had made trial of many, and had tested the entire and solid nature of the livers in accordance with the water and pasture they established there the fortifications; if however, they found them faulty, by analogy they judged: that the supply of food and water which was to be found in these places would be pestilential in the case of human bodies.” 10 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.6.1-3; pp. 53-57. “When the walls are set round the city, there follow the divisions of the sites within the walls, and the layings out of the broad streets and the alleys with a view to aspect, these will be rightly laid out if the winds are carefully shut out from the alleys. For if the winds are cold they are unpleasant; if hot they infect; if moist, they are injurious. […] Suppose they are excluded. Not only will this render a place healthy for sound persons; but also if any diseases shall happen to arise from other infections, those who in other healthy places find cure from counteracting medicine, in these, on account of the moderate climate and by the exclusion of the winds, will be still more quickly cured. For the diseases which are cured with difficulty in the regions which are described above are these: cold in the windpipe, cough, pleurisy, phthisis, spitting of blood, and others which are cured by strengthening remedies rather than by purgings. These ailments are treated with difficulty, first because they are caught from chills, secondly because when the strength is worn out by disease the air is agitated; it is thinned by the agitation of winds; at the same time it draws the sap from diseased persons and renders them thinner. On the other hand, a smooth and thick air which is free from the passage of draughts and does not move backwards and forwards, builds up their limbs by its steadiness, and so nourishes and refreshes those who are caught by these diseases.”


Symmetry, Decor, and Distribution.11 ‘Decor’ involves the correct choice of details for the

temples of each of the various gods, made according to convention, or custom, or nature.12

‘Natural decor,’ however, consists of the choice of suitably healthy sites, with temples of

healing gods requiring a good water supply to facilitate recovery from illness.13 The correct

choice of site also allows rooms to be oriented to achieve appropriate daylight.14 While

natural decor determines the appropriate relation to site in order to ensure the health of its

inhabitants, decor based on convention and custom ensures that the ornamentation correctly

expresses the character of the god to whom the temple is dedicated, and moreover, that it is

followed consistently throughout the work to prevent causing offence.15 Unlike the meaning

of ‘decor’ as visual beauty, Vitruvius’ use of the term is generally understood to mean the

more common ‘decorum’ or propriety, addressed in contemporary texts on poetics and

rhetoric, especially Cicero’s De oratore and De officiis, as well as Greek texts, most

notably Aristotle’s Poetics.16 The allusion to rhetoric makes decor a form of expression,

demanding an appropriateness of style depending on the orator, audience, and subject

matter. Moreover, that expression takes on a moral dimension, as decorum, or in Greek

prepon (‘propriety’), determines what is natural and fitting for each person to do, and that

their actions correspond to both the social and the natural order. According to Vesely, it is

11 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.2.1-7; pp. 25-36. 12 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.2.5-7; pp. 27-29. “Decor demands the faultless ensemble of a work composed, in accordance with precedent, of approved details. It obeys convention, […] or custom, or nature.” 13 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.2.7; pp. 29-31. “There will be a natural decor: first, if for all the temples there shall be chosen the most healthy sites with suitable springs in those places in which shrines are to be set up; secondly and especially for Aesculapius and Salus; and generally for those gods by whose medical power sick persons are manifestly healed. For when sick persons are moved from a pestilent to a healthy place and the water supply is from wholesome fountains, they will more quickly recover.” 14 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.2.7; p. 31. “Also there will be natural seemliness if light is taken from the east for bedrooms and libraries; for baths and winter apartments, from the wintry sunset; for picture galleries and the apartments which need a steady light, from the north, because that quarter of the heavens is neither illumined nor darkened by the sun’s course but is fixed unchangeable throughout the day.” 15 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.2.7; p. 31. “Again, if in Doric entablatures, dentils are carved on the cornices, or if with voluted capitals and Ionic entablatures, triglyphs are applied, characteristics are transferred from one style to another: the work as a whole will jar upon us [offendetur], since it includes details foreign to the order.” 16 See Onians, Bearers of Meaning, pp. 36-39; Vesely, “Architecture and the Poetics of Representation”; and Peter Kohane and Michael Hill “The eclipse of a commonplace idea: decorum in architectural theory,” ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly, 5/1, 2001, pp. 63-77.


through decorum or propriety that architecture is able to participate in the order of reality,

and is able to represent that order by making it manifest in the sensible realm.17

Through the principle of decor, Vitruvius connects the health of the body to its symbolic

significance. Threatened by the ill effects of nature, the body must be contained and

protected by buildings, and is dependent upon their correct execution in order to reduce that

threat. This body is ever vulnerable to the fragmenting effects of chaos and violence. The

symbolic body, however, demonstrates that the unity and integrity of the body is intact, that

its internal order is in accordance with the order of nature. The symbolic body, as a model

of unity used to determine architectural composition, transcends the work of architecture.

As Victor Burgin writes, “[…] the body contains the very generating principle of the

building.”18 Through decorum, architecture makes manifest the correspondence between

internal and external order, acting as a representation of that order in the material world. It

is the relationship between these two bodies, the symbolic and the physical, that can be seen

to change throughout the history of architectural theory. In the use of the body as a

compositional or symbolic referent, architects have frequently been influenced by the various

attempts to discover the order of reality occurring within the body. By turning to

contemporaneous understandings of the body in medicine and science, architects have

maintained a tension between the body as both unified and fragmented, between buildings

that are contained by bodies, and bodies that are contained by buildings.

The metaphor of body as building is dependent upon the expressive function of

architecture, that is, its relation to language, through which the body emerges as a model of

unity. As microcosm, the body demonstrates a unity that is the source of beauty, and

therefore to be imitated in the various arts. In book eight of the Poetics, Aristotle describes

the principle of unity of plot, described as a structural union of parts such that if any one is

displaced or removed the whole will be disjointed or disturbed. For Aristotle, the whole is

an organic assembly of parts such that no part can be added nor taken away without

17 Vesely writes: “In its fully articulated sense, [prepon] means an harmonious participation in the order of reality and in the outward expression of that order. The outward expression does not refer to mere imitation or representation of order which is already familiar to us. It implies rather that order is represented in such a way that it becomes conspicuous and actually present in sensual abundance.” Vesely, “Architecture and the Poetics of Representation,” p. 29. 18 Victor Burgin, “The City in Pieces,” in Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Mark Driscoll (eds), Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies, Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, pp. 5-20, p. 6.


detracting from it.19 Applied to the body, this principle of unity is dependent upon the soul.

For Aristotle, all living things are animated by a soul; man differs from animals in possessing

the capacity for reason, but both are alive because they are permeated by a soul.20 The

soul is not transcendent, but is to be found within, immanent in each and every living being.

In its most basic form, the soul is nutritive or vegetative, that it, it is able to feed and

reproduce itself. The soul of animals is further capable of perception and sensation, for

which it uses the organs of the (animal) body. In order to understand the soul, Aristotle

anatomised the bodies of animals, taking them apart in order to understand the purpose of

each part. This is explained as follows: ‘Now, as each of the parts of the body, like every

other instrument, is for the sake of some purpose, viz., some action, it is evident that the

body as a whole must exist for the sake of some complex action. Just as the saw is there for

the sake of sawing and not sawing for the sake of the saw, because sawing is the using of

the instrument, so in one way the body exists for the sake of the soul, and the parts of the

body for the sake of those functions to which they are naturally adapted.’21 The soul is the

purpose for which the body exists; and since the parts, naturally adapted to their functions,

combine to form the whole, their purposes contribute to the expression of the soul through

the body.

Sacrificial Bodies

The myth of origins told by Vitruvius has reappeared many times in architectural theory,

often interpreted through the idea of the ‘primitive hut.’22 These explanations of

19 Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter VIII: Unity of Plot. “As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one, when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For that which may be present or absent without being perceived, is not an organic part of the whole.” Aristotle The Poetics of Aristotle, translated by S. H. Butcher, London; New York: MacMillan, 1895, p. 33. 20 Aristotle, On the Soul, 404 b, p. 23. 21 Aristotle, The Parts of Animals, 1.5; translated by A.L. Peck, London: Heinemann, 1937, p. 103. See also Philip Steadman, The Evolution Of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 10. 22 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 2.1.1-1.8; pp. 77-87. See also Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972; R.D. Dripps, The First House: Myth, Paradigm, and the Task of Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.


architecture’s emergence from ritual, symbolism, or technology (fire) describe how the

needs, actions, or limits of the body were transformed into practices of making and

decoration. The frequent return to origins suggest that such practices must continually be

revalidated, their meaning reaffirmed in relation to prevalent belief.23 More recently,

Rykwert has described how the ornamentation to be found in architecture, especially that of

columns, originates in the markings of the body made during initiation rites. These markings,

achieved through practices such as scarifying, circumcision, or tattooing, signify the body’s

separation from an unreflective engagement with the natural world.24 The marking of the

body had to be, writes Rykwert, both memorable and evident, a rite of passage into a

society in which the self may be understood through association with others. For this

reason, the marking occurs through rituals of mutilation or torture, giving rise to such an

acute experience of pain that the body is conceptually separated from the natural world.

The markings transform the surface of the body into a radical discontinuity, bringing to

presence the experience of pain in the form of traces on the body that are amenable to

interpretation. Those traces continue to emphasise the alterity of the body, its existence as a

cultural artifact. That alterity is further emphasised by markings, especially tattoos, which

provide a map or password for the soul’s journey into the afterlife. Rykwert describes how

Queequeg, the Polynesian mariner in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, carves his coffin with

the same markings that appear on his body, their pattern presenting a theory of heaven and

earth.25 Similarly, the process of marking the body is transferred to the objects used to

mark out ground, themselves an analogue of the body’s orientation in and inhabitation of

space.26

The violence of ritual is also transformed into ornament through practices of

commemoration. “Architects ought to be familiar with history,” writes Vitruvius, “because in

their works they often design many ornaments about which they ought to render an account

23 “The return to origins always implies a rethinking of what you do customarily, an attempt to renew the validity of your everyday actions, or simply a recall of the natural (or even divine) sanction for your repeating them for a season.” Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, p. 192. 24 Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 118. 25 Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 119. 26 “The planting of a post is a primal gesture—the ability to orientate ourselves, to know the orthogonality of our body to the ground, is a condition of our being.” Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 119-122.


to inquirers.”27 In his descriptions of caryatids, marble statues of long robed women used

as columns, Vitruvius reveals a familiarity with architecture’s violent origins. The Greeks,

having defeated the Peloponesian state of Caria, enslaved the women as a warning. The

architects of the time transformed images of the women into columns, thereby making their

punishment visible to others.28 Similarly, after the Spartans defeated the Persians, a

colonnade was erected.29 From the violence of battle, in which the bodies of men are

brutally sundered, comes the erection of trophies; the demonstration of victory represented

in ornament. Transformed into ornament, these bodies describe the victory of the winners,

and the suffering of the losers. As columns, the captives are condemned forever to bearing

the weight of the building above. These strategies of commemoration are typical of acts of

destruction and reconstruction in classical ritual. The violence of hunting or war, by

compromising the unity of animal or human bodies, was regarded as a threat to natural

order. Rituals of reassembly were necessary in order to appease the gods, and to bring

them to presence in the mortal world.30 The partition and reassembly of the victim’s body

helps to overcome the limitation of mortality, the separation from the world of the gods. But

it also overcomes the limitation of embodiment, the separation of individuals from each

other. Sacrifice enacts a ritual of sharing a divided body, thus uniting worshippers as one

body. The act of communion, of consuming the partitioned body of the sacrificial victim,

enables the presence of the god to permeate each of the bodies of those present, uniting

them together into a community.

The tokens or tropes of reassembled bodies used to mark battlefields and hunting

grounds were also used to mark, or decorate, temples. According to George Hersey, this

27 Vitruvius De Architectura, 1.1.5; p. 9. 28 “And so the architects of that time designed for public buildings figures of matrons placed to carry burdens; in order that the punishment of the sin of the Cariatid women might be known to posterity and historically recorded.” Vitruvius De Architectura, 1.1.5; p. 11. 29 “There they placed statues of their captives in barbaric dress—punishing their pride with deserved insults—to support the roof, that their enemies might quake, fearing the workings of such bravery, and their fellow-citizens looking upon a pattern of manhood might by such glory be roused and prepared for the defence of freedom.” Vitruvius De Architectura, 1.1.6; p. 11. 30 See Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, translated by Peter Bing, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983. “Time and time again in my th, the remnants of a victim torn apart are collected, deposited, brought back to life.” p. 232.


can be seen as one of the primary sources of ornament.31 Ornament can serve to

immortalise the victims of war, or it can commit to stone a record of the outcome as

confirmation of the propriety of suffering.32 Yet the demonstrative nature of literal figures is

but a part of a larger didactic role of ornament within architecture. Hersey argues that

ornament, rather than a remnant of obsolete construction techniques, is a ‘trope’ of social,

political, economic, and religious events, allowing them to be understood through bodily

metaphors.33 Far from mere embellishment, ornament was an essential part of the acts of

partitioning and reassembly necessary for the erection of buildings. This occurred firstly in

sacred groves, where the trees, (also thought to contain gods) were decorated with

sacrificial offerings. Such decorations continued as trees were transformed into columns,

and the first temples constructed. Along with the bodies of victims, the communion of

sacrifice was able to endure in the details of the temple. These arose initially from the

transformations of body parts, with teeth, bones, and skins becoming dentils, triglyphs, and

tympana. Details also arose from the decorations associated with sacrifice. Torus

mouldings at the base of columns evolved from ropes used to bind feet, and capitals were

derived from ceremonial headdress.34 Another important aspect of detailing was the

protection of life-giving fluids drained from the victim. Forms of ornament that are today

referred to as ‘weathering,’ serving to drain water away from the surface of a building,

originated in the channels carved to collect blood, wine and other offerings. Collecting these

fluids was essential, since they were considered to be the very force of life of the body from

which they had been drained.35

31 George Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. 32 “Caryatids, prisoners, herms, terms, atlantes, and Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns were set up as freestanding monuments throughout the Roman empire, presumably as monuments to the ancestral justice done against treachery. One might call them trophies of the battle against civil disorder. This practice, says Cesare, constituted a form of public instruction known as stylography—literally, teaching or demonstrating via columns.” Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, p. 126. 33 Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, pp. 1-10. 34 Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, pp. 11-45. 35 “The water had to be extruded, just as soul, life-force, strength, sexual ability, and other god-given powers were conceived as fluids to be absorbed by, or removed from, the human body.” Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, p. 40.


Other explanations can also be found connecting the body to the origins of architecture,

especially those of the clearing or chora, the sacred glade or dancing ground.36 Yet what

the tropes of ritual and sacrifice suggest is a range of dualities by which architecture relates

directly to the body. Both bodies and buildings appear as a unified whole, yet one that is

made up of parts. In the body, that unity depends upon a soul, while the use of sacrificial

bodies to validate constructed edifices suggests a need for buildings to possess some

equivalent measure of that vital force.37 Both bodies and buildings are liable to

fragmentation, to a loss of unity, and a consequent loss of vital force. Principles of decorum,

by their connection to rhetoric, suggest that bodies and buildings are amenable to

interpretation, and thus appear as both object and text. What makes them legible are

markings on the surface, markings that represent or make manifest invisible depths,

especially the depths of the soul and its susceptibility to suffering. Through all of these

dualities–part and whole, unity and fragmentation, living and dead, object and text, surface

and depth–the body becomes a model for buildings in terms of their relation to both social

and natural order. They do so by demonstrating an engagement in rituals of

commemoration, practices which acknowledge suffering and attempt to give it meaning.

36 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation,” Chora 1, 1994, pp. 1-34. On the ‘clearing,’ see Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by W. Lovitt, New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 37 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 1.


The Body Reborn

With the revival of classical texts

during the Renaissance, Vitruvius’ Ten

Books, as the only surviving work on

architecture, took on a great importance.

The first architectural text of the

Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti’s On

the Art of Building in Ten Books,

appearing in full around 1452 (through not

printed until 1486), contains extensive

allusion to and criticism of the Vitruvian

original.38 The notebooks of Francesco

di Giorgio from the fifteenth century

contain a version of the Vitruvian figure,

along with several studies of human

proportion in relation to plans, facades, entablatures, and even whole cities. Publications of

Vitruvius began with that by Fra Giocondo in 1511, soon followed by Italian translations by

Fabio Calvi and Antonio da Sangallo.39 Cesare Cesariano published an edition of Vitruvius

in 1521, which also reflected the ideas of his teacher, Donato Bramante, while an academy

dedicated to the study of Vitruvius was founded in 1542.40 According to Rudolf

Wittkower, the image of Vitruvian Man became the principal justification for the large

number of centrally planned churches built from the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries,

exemplified by Bramante’s Tempietto, the basilica church of Saint Peter in Montorio, Rome

(1502). Through the image of Vitruvian Man and the symbolism of the circle, Christian

architecture was transformed from a representation of Christ crucified into a Platonic image

of divine perfection, an earthly manifestation of an intelligible mathematical symbol.

38 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. 39 Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, pp. 13-16. 40 Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, p. 16.

Figure 3: Vitruvian Figure. Francesco di Giorgio:

Trattati, vol 1, p. 68. Codex Ashburnam 361, 15v.,

Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana, Florence. (As

published in Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 60.)


Figure 4: Body as ornament.

Francesco di Giorgio: Trattati, vol 1,

fig. 25; Codex Salluziano 148, 15v.,

Biblioteca Reale, Turin. (As

published in Rykwert, The Dancing

Column, p. 57.)

Figure 5: Body as façade. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati, vol 1, p. 90. Codex Salluziano 148, 21v.,

Biblioteca Reale, Turin. (As published in Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 63.)


Another consequence of the renewed interest in ancient texts was the erection of

theatres for the performance of classical drama and comedy, plays written by Aristophanes,

Euripides, Aeschylus, and others. Alberti, for instance, designed a theatre in Rome for Pope

Nicholas V in 1452, and devotes a section of De re aedificatoria to the design of theatres,

circuses, and amphitheatres.41 One new type of ‘performance’ undertaken in theatres was

that of anatomical demonstrations, involving the dissection of corpses for the purpose of

medical instruction. The first anatomy theatres were temporary structures made of wood,

built either out of doors or within an existing building. The first permanent theatre, built in

Padua in the 1580’s, was followed by a series of similar spaces throughout the academies of

Europe. The use of theatres was in part necessitated by the popularity of these events.

Initially, in academies such as Salerno where medicine was taught in the eleventh and twelfth

centuries, anatomical demonstrations were made in lecture theatres using the bodies of pigs.

But during the fourteenth century, demonstrations such as those by Mundinus at Bologna

were made using human bodies. The dissection of corpses, having been discouraged for

many centuries by the Catholic Church, was justified by using the bodies of criminals, as an

extension of punishment inflicted through public acts of execution. By compromising

Christian burial practices, partition of the body after death would prevent the soul of the

criminal from ascending to heaven. These events were extremely popular, attracting an

audience from the upper echelons of a class society, and attended by travellers, increasingly

touring Europe as a cultural pursuit. In The Body Emblazoned, Jonathan Sawday argues

that the work of the anatomists played heavily upon the popular imagination, evoking a

combination of morbid and erotic fascination far beyond mere interest in the workings of the

body.42 Attached to centres of learning, anatomy theatres were afforded a high degree of

respect, and began to form part of the network of cultural spaces by which cities were

identified and differentiated. “The anatomy theatre was a register of civic importance, an

index of the intellectual advancement of the community, an advertisement for a city’s

flourishing cultural and artistic life.”43

41 Alberti, On the Art Of Building, 8.7; pp. 268-278. 42 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, London; New York: Routledge, 1995.


The Fabric of the Body

As with architects, anatomists were limited to a single text received from the classical

text, namely, the writings of Galen, a Roman physician from the second century AD.

Lectures consisted of a presentation of anatomical knowledge, elaborated through Galen’s

text, in the context of philosophical instruction, based upon Aristotle’s writings on the soul

(De Anima). The anatomy lecture was a demonstration that was both medical and

philosophical, to show the body, as described by Galen, as the place of the soul, explained

through the writings of Aristotle. The format involved the professor, such as Mundinus,

reading aloud from Galen and Aristotle. This was accompanied, or even followed, by the

dissection of the body, performed by a surgeon over a period of several days. In this

format, the professor did not need to engage with the corpse; it was merely there to confirm

what appeared in the text. It was the text that was authoritative; there was nothing to be

learnt from the body that did not already appear in writing. The sequence of dissection

worked from the outside in, starting with those areas most liable to decomposition.

However, this contrasts with Galen’s suggestion that one should first learn about the bones,

because they play the same role in the human body as walls do in houses.44 Galen wrote:

“‘The nature of all the bones, as I said, is to be thoroughly learnt either from man, or from the body of the ape, or better from both. Then one should move on to the anatomy of the muscles. For these two parts of the body underlie all the others, like the foundations of a building.’“45

Comparisons between bodies and buildings occur frequently throughout Galen’s text.

Although a common rhetorical strategy, this may also be due to the fact that his father,

Nicon of Pergamum, was an architect. Nicon, who also provided Galen’s education, was

connected with the building trade in the temple area of a town famous for its sanctuary of the

healing god Asclepius.46 Galen chose medicine, yet his writings on the body focus upon its

43 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 42. 44 Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997, p. 27. 45 Galen, as cited in Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 27. 46 Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1973, p. 3.


structure, seen as an assembly of parts each of which is made to fulfil a particular purpose.47

Although Galen was interested in human anatomy, much of his work was derived from the

bodies of apes and other animals, since dissecting human bodies was not permitted in the

Rome of his day. What knowledge of human anatomy he did gain came from skeletal

remains or from treating the sick. At one point, Galen was appointed physician to the

gladiators: a job which, remarks Porter, “enlarged his anatomical and surgical expertise,

since wounds afforded windows onto the body.”48

Galen’s text, and the method of dissection recommended therein, were to form the

foundation of anatomical practice during the Renaissance. His method, and the general

format of anatomical lectures, was followed for over 200 years, until the dissemination of

knowledge was fundamentally changed with emergence of printing during the fifteenth

century.49 Architectural and anatomical treatises were among the earliest printed books,

published alongside classical works of literature and philosophy. Some appear to have

shared the same illustrators, as images from Johannes de Ketham’s Fasciculo di Medicina

(Venice, 1493) and the first edition of Hypnerotomachia Poliphilo, published at the press

of Aldus Manutius in 1499, suggest.50

47 “The thesis that Galen maintains in On the use of parts is that all the parts of the human body were made for a purpose; that they were made in the best way to fulfil that purpose; that this purpose is the evidence for, and the expression of, Nature’s foresight and wisdom; and that anatomizing to reveal the uses of the parts is the key to both understanding and appreciating that purpose and hence the wisdom of nature.” Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 30. 48 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 73. 49 On the influence of printing, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 50 I am grateful to John MacArthur for pointing this out. On the woodcuts of the Hypnerotomachia, see Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, passim.


Figure 6: Image from Colonna,

Hypnerotomachia Poliphilo, Venice,

1499, p. a7 (Chapter 1 p. 13).

Similar illustration styles used for both

architectural and medical treatises.

Figure 7: Image from Fasciculo di Medicina,

Venice, 1493. (As published in Cunningham,

Anatomical Renaissance, p. 45.)


But the greatest work of anatomical illustration during the Renaissance, published in

1543, was De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564). Vesalius

first studied medicine at Paris, then went on to Padua, where he was appointed

demonstrator or surgeon. He quickly gained recognition for his skills at dissecting, and the

drawings he made to assist the demonstration proved popular with the students. This

inspired him to publish woodcuts, for which he enlisted the help of Johannes Stephanus of

Calcar, a student of Titian.51 These images, used by Vesalius to illustrate the Fabrica, differ

markedly from those used up until that time. Prior to the Renaissance, anatomical

knowledge had been illustrated with internal elements—heart, lungs, veins, etc.—drawn

directly onto the body. The figures, still alive, peer out of the page toward the reader, with

their internal workings visible on the surface. This imparts an odd transparency to the

bodies, with interior and exterior visible at the same time.52 In comparison, the images in

Vesalius’ text appear more realistic, more accurate as a description of the body interior.

But this is only possible because the images owe as much to the means of inquiry as to the

body itself. The images in the Fabrica, and in many contemporary anatomical texts, make

the interior visible by opening the body; the skin is show as cut and folded back. Thus the

act of dissection is described along with the results. To render the interior of the body using

perspective, it is first necessary to overcome both its opacity and its compaction. That is,

the body must be spatialised, opened and partitioned by the hand so that the eye can

follow. This spatialisation transformed the body from a compounded mass into an

arrangement of parts whose relative positions could be shown.53 The three-dimensional

complexity of the body, the depth beneath the surface, is rendered as a two dimensional

image through a combination of dissection and perspective representation.54 The

penetration of vision into the body interior is only possible when preceded by the hands.

The discontinuity of surface is lost as the interior of the body is revealed as an apportionment

51 Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 93. 52 “[T]the body is rendered oddly transparent—we are able to see both the exterior and the interior at the same time. It is as though the artist is allowing us to peer through the body’s surface, rather than into its structures.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 102. 53 “The body, then, has been carefully rearranged, with structures removed, or pushed to one side, or ‘fractured’ to enable art to intervene within the body cavity.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 101. 54 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, pp. 95-97.


of space. The interior space of the body is rendered contiguous with space outside the

body, and becomes metonymic of space in general.55

The importance of spatial continuity

between interior and exterior is further

revealed in illustrations showing flayed

corpses standing in idyllic landscapes.

Intended to show musculature, a crucial

element of the fabric of the body, the

images do away with the enclosure of

the skin by omitting it altogether. But

more important is the fact that the

figures appear to be alive, adopting the

poses of classical statuary, unperturbed

by their condition. In their equanimity,

the figures reveal a complicity in their

own dissection. Sometimes this

complicity is more literal, as figures hold

back their own skin to reveal interior

organs.

In this way, the anatomists’

involvement with death is effaced by the

significance of what they reveal. The

knowledge they obtained, although extracted from corpses, provides the secrets to the

operation of the living body, the secrets of life itself. The images show a corpse that is

neither a passive nor reluctant subject of anatomisation, but is instead an accomplice to the

55 “Space, the positioning of the body within a three-dimensional matrix, was the key to anatomical understanding. […] The study of anatomy was the study of the organization of space.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 86.

Figure 8: Dissected figure from Vesalius, De

Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543, Book II, Tab.

II. The juxtaposition of corpse and ruin implies

an uncovering of structural order.


process of revealing its internal fabric.56 The absence of the anatomist from the images

further emphasises this ‘rhetoric of self-dissection.’ The violence of anatomy is obviated as

the corpse is shown to willingly give up its secrets, without suffering. The ‘naturalness’ of

the process is asserted, where the body, despite being dissected, is able to retain its place

amongst the world of the living. The classical ruins within the landscape emphasise the

continuity of the anatomical

knowledge with that of the

ancients, whilst also stressing

the inevitability of death and

decay, the mutability of human

affairs.57

In the rich symbolism that

is the frontispiece of Vesalius’

Fabrica, the setting itself is

made complicit in the

demonstration. At the centre

of the image, Vesalius, flanked

by Galen and Aristotle, can be

seen holding back the skin of a

dissected corpse. The scene

takes place inside what

appears to be a circular

basilica. Most theatres at the

time were circular or ovoid in plan, a geometry that derives in large part from the position of

the body at its centre. Unlike other theatres, the point of focus, the corpse, lay flat, and was

thus visible from above, and from all directions.

56 “Anatomy is shown to be a science which (contrary to what we might expect) seems to animate the body, and endow it (albeit temporarily) with a life of its own so that it could assist in the engaging spectacle of its own division.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 113. 57 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 115.

Figure 9: Frontispiece from Vesalius, De Humani Corporis

Fabrica, 1543. The setting, like the body at it centre,

appears to have been dissected.


However, at the top corners, the entablature can be seen to turn outwards, as though the

building has itself been sectioned. Sawday argues that the frontispiece depicts a ‘cross-

section’ of an anatomy demonstration: “It is as though the complete structure, the

surrounding basilica […] with its massive architectural supports, together with the concentric

rings of benches, has been cross-sectioned along the diameter which passes through the

cadaver.”58 This in part a pictorial device, allowing the tableau to be presented for the

purposes of instruction. Yet it also asserts that the mysteries of a building’s internal structure

can be exposed to view in the same way as those of the body.

Renaissance Bodies

For architects of the Renaissance, these changes to the understanding and representation

of the body were not without influence. Joseph Rykwert suggests that the use of the term

‘fabric’ in the Vesalian title coincides with a shift in attitude toward making, from the

determination of outward appearance to the production of a whole shown in its various

divisions and complex workings.59 This shift, according to Rykwert, occurs in a period of

about two centuries following the early writings of Alberti. In early parts of De re

aedificatoria, written around the 1440’s, Alberti is careful to distinguish the architect from

the carpenter [fabrum], who is merely an instrument in the hands of the architect.60 For

58 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 67. Sawday suggests that the illustration is based upon Bramante’s Tempietto, a symbol uniting Christian sacrifice (martyrdom) and divine order through the image of the body. The sectioning of both body and building challenge the Copernican view of the universe, which had been published earlier the same year, instead positing the womb, our point of origin, as the centre of the universe. (pp. 70-71.) On the relation between Vesalius and Copernicus, see also Martin Kemp, “Temples of the Body and Temples of the Cosmos: Vision and Visualisation in the Vesalian and Copernican Revolution,” in Brian S. Baigrie (ed.) Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science, Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1996, pp. 40-85. 59 Joseph Rykwert, “Body and Mind,” Storia Delle Idee Problemi e Perpectitive Seminario Inter 49, October 1987, pp. 157-168. Rykwert writes: “[…] the remarkable and unchronicled change in the implication of the word fabrica seems to me to provide a useful comment on the changing role of architecture – and I would say, by a necessary analogy a change in our valuation of building and of the place of our bodies within them. And I would even hazard a generalization at this point: that the terms in which we describe world order, buildings, and our bodies form a constant metaphoric chain, whose shifts and deformations have their effect in our sociology and our medicine as well as in our architecture.” p. 159. 60 “I should explain exactly whom I mean by an architect; for it is no carpenter that I would have you compare to the greatest exponents of other disciplines: the carpenter is but an instrument in the hands of the architect. Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can be


Alberti, architecture is an intellectual pursuit, for which the architect “[…] must have

understanding and knowledge of all the highest and most noble disciplines.”61 The

distinction is further emphasised by the difference between the two elements of which the

aesthetic appearance of a building is said to consist: Beauty and Ornament. In a clear debt

to Aristotle, Alberti defines Beauty as follows:

“Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.”62 Beauty is the most noble, inherent in the object considered beautiful, while ornament is merely auxiliary or complementary, an attachment or addition to beauty.63

For Alberti, the source of beauty is nature, to be found not only in the human body, but

in the bodies of animals.64 In Alberti’s text, many of the Vitruvian principles are reiterated,

including the account of the human body as the origin of the orders. Metaphors of bodily

structure, however, are more extensive, suggesting a reasonable knowledge of Galenic

anatomy. He even cites Galen, although this is only in order to describe a fever frequently

afflicting the citizens of Rome.65 Alberti’s descriptions of construction techniques make

frequent metaphorical reference to the body, comparing parts of buildings to bones,

ligaments, flesh, and nerves.66 The bodies of animals demonstrate the ingenuity of Nature in

several ways. Firstly, they provide a model of structural stability, with bones all linked to

each other and bound fast with muscles and ligaments, enabling the whole arrangement to

fitted out for the noble needs of man, by the movement of weights and the joining and massing of bodies.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, prologue, p. 3. 61 Ibid., p. 3. 62 Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 6.2; p. 156. 63 “[…] ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty. From this it follows, I believe, that beauty is some inherent property, to be found suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful; whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 6.2; p. 156. 64 “The great experts of antiquity […] have instructed us that a building is very like an animal, and that Nature must be imitated when we delineate it.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 9.5; p. 301. 65 Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 1.5; pp. 16-17. 66 Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 3.14; pp. 85-86. “The same method of construction should be followed for the vaults as is used for the walls. In fact, the bones within the wall continue unbroken right up to the top of the vault; they are constructed in the same way and are set a correspondingly similar distance apart, the ligaments stretch from bone to bone, and the section between is filled in with paneling. […] In short, with every type of vault, we should imitate Nature throughout, that is, bind together the bones and interweave flesh with nerves running along every possible section: in length, breadth, and depth and also obliquely across. When laying the stones to the vault, we should, in my opinion, copy the ingenuity of Nature.”


stand on its own.67 Secondly, they provide a model for the relative sizes of parts, the whole

being a composition of parts whose dimensions correspond to one another.68 And finally,

the bodies of animals provide a model of suitability of the parts, both to their individual

purpose, and to their purpose as a whole.69

But just what it is that produces beauty? A discussion of the cause of beauty Alberti

leaves until Chapter 5 of Book 9, and then he defines it only after some equivocation.70

Since every building (or body) is composed of parts, changes to the size, shape, position, or

number of those parts will detract from the overall ‘seemliness’ of the thing.71 Beauty thus

depends upon number, outline, and position. But it also depends upon a further quality,

which is to be found in Nature. This Alberti describes as concinnitas, being the means by

which parts that are different to one another may be combined together in such a way that

they correspond in appearance.72 Alberti concludes:

67 “The physicians have noticed that Nature was so thorough in forming the bodies of animals, that she left no bone separate or disjointed from the rest. Likewise, we should link the bones and bind them fast with muscles and ligaments, so that their frame and structure is complete and rigid enough to ensure that its fabric will still stand on its own, even if all else is removed.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 3.12; p. 81. 68 “[…] just as the head, foot, and indeed any member must correspond to each other and to all the rest of the body in an animal, so in a building, and especially a temple, the parts of the whole body must be so composed that they all correspond to one another, and any one, taken individually, may provide the dimensions of all the rest.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 7.5; p. 199. 69 “As for Italy, their inborn thrift prompted them to be the first who made their buildings very like animals. Take the case of a horse: they realized that where the shape of each member looked suitable for a particular use, so the whole animal itself would work well in that use. Thus they found that grace of form could never be separated or divorced from suitability for use.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 6.3; p. 158. 70 “Now I come to a matter with which we have promised to deal all along: every kind of beauty and ornament consists of it; or, to put it more clearly, it springs from every rule of beauty. This is an extremely difficult inquiry; for whatever that one entity is, which is either extracted or drawn from the number and nature of all the parts, of imparted to each by sure and constant method, or handled in such a manner as to tie and bond several elements into a single bundle or body, according to a true and consistent agreement and sympathy—and something of this kind is exactly what we seek—then surely that entity must share some part of the force and juice, as it were, of all the elements of which it is composed or blended; for otherwise their discord and differences would cause conflict and disunity.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 9.5; p. 301. 71 “For within the form and figure of a building there resides some natural excellence and perfection that excites the mind and is immediately recognised by it. I myself believe that form, dignity, grace, and other such qualities depend on it, and as soon as anything is removed or altered, these qualities are themselves weakened and perish. Once we are convinced of this, it will not take long to discuss what may be removed, enlarged, or altered, in the form and figure. For every body consists entirely of parts that are fixed and individual; if these are removed, enlarged, reduced, or transferred somewhere inappropriate, the very composition will be spoiled that gives the body its seemly appearance.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 9.5; p. 302. 72 “It is the task and aim of concinnitas to compose parts that are quite separate from each other by their nature, according to some precise rule, so that they correspond to one another in appearance. […]


“Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline, and position, as dictated by concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in nature. This is the main object of the art of building, and the source of her dignity, charm, and worth.”73

Concinnitas, the rule of Nature which architects must learn in order to achieve beauty

through the composition of parts, complements the skill of the architect known as

compartition. In Book 2, Alberti describes six elements, locality, area, compartition, wall,

roof, and opening, “ […] of which the whole matter of building is composed”.74

Compartition is the art of dividing up the site or the building into smaller parts appropriate

for their purpose.75 With compartition, the unity of the whole is achieved by its articulation

into parts, which in their variety and harmony make up the whole.76 Through both

concinnitas and compartition, Alberti emphasises the role of architecture as an intellectual

endeavour, of bringing parts together for structural, functional, and above all, aesthetic

purposes far beyond the mere fabrication of the carpenter. That intellectual endeavour is

further emphasised by architecture’s moral dimension, for which ornament takes on a new

significance. As well as the treatment of ornament as an attachment or addition to beauty,

Alberti describes the importance of ornament as a demonstration of a building’s status. In

books seven, eight, and nine, Alberti describes the ornament ‘proper’ to sacred, public

Neither in the whole body nor in its parts does concinnitas flourish as much as it does in Nature herself; thus I might call it the spouse of the soil and of reason. […] Everything that Nature produces is regulated by the law of concinnitas, and her chief concern is that whatever she produces should be absolutely perfect.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 9.5; p. 302. For a discussion of concinnitas, see also Robert Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, Chapter 5. 73 Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 9.5; p. 303. 74 Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 1.2; p. 8. 75 “Compartition is the process of dividing up the site into yet smaller units, so that the building may be considered as being made up of close-fitting smaller buildings, joined together like members of the whole body.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 1.2; p. 8. 76 “The chief ornament [sic] in every object is that it should be free of all that is unseemly. Compartition, therefore, will be seemly when it is neither jumpy, nor confused, nor disorganised, nor disconnected, nor composed of incongruous elements; it should be made up of members neither too numerous, nor too small, nor too large, nor too dissonant or ungraceful, nor too disjointed or distant from the rest of the body, as it were. But in terms of its nature, utility, and methods of operation, everything should be so defined, so exact in its order, number, size, arrangement, and form, that every single part of the work will be considered necessary, of great comfort, and in pleasing harmony with the rest.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 6.5; p. 163.


secular, and private buildings, respectively. Ornament is seen to give ‘dignity’ to each of

these three kinds of buildings, in appropriate measure according to proper hierarchy.

“With sacred works, especially public ones, every art and industry must be employed to render them as ornate as possible: sacred works must be furnished for the gods, secular ones only for man, the latter, being less dignified, should concede to the former, yet still be ennobled with their own details of ornament.”77

The meaning of ornament is also extended to include the way in which each of these building

types, appropriately distributed and arranged, enhances the city.78 The buildings themselves

become the ornament, as “[…] a well-maintained and well-adorned temple is obviously the

greatest and most important ornament of a city.”79 Although Alberti does not directly

address the Vitruvian principle of decor, its presence is implicit in this aspect of ornament.

Its omission is probably to the then pervasiveness of the principle of decorum, its operation

as an ethical principle of social behaviour.80 Schooled in Ciceronian rhetoric, Alberti

attributes to ornament the role of expression, such that a building is able to speak of its use

or purpose, and of the social status of its occupants. For Alberti, the principles of beauty

and ornament, and their achievement through concinnitas and compartition, demonstrate a

concern for the unity and integrity of architectural works, their outward appearance an

expression of their moral character. Descriptions of parts, rhetorically related to parts of the

body, occur only in context of their proper assembly or relation. Yet in the various treatises

published after Alberti, it is possible to discern an increasing interest in architecture’s inner

complexity.

77 Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 8.1; p. 244. 78 “The area of the city, and the surrounding region, will be greatly enhanced if the buildings are appropriately distributed and arranged.” Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 7.1; p. 190. 79 Alberti, On the Art Of Building in Ten Books, 7.3; p. 194. 80 Kohane and Hill, “Decorum in architectural theory,” passim.


In the work of fifteenth century architect

Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, the body is

described as the principal source for architecture.

In his Treatise on Architecture, published around

1460, Filarete asserts that all the proportions,

measures, qualities, and origins of buildings derive

from the form and figure of man.81 As well as

building upon the principles of measure and

proportion in relation to the orders found in

Vitruvius and Alberti, Filarete connected them to

the Christian narrative of origins, describing the first shelter formed by Adam as he raised his

arms above his head.82 Later, Filarete describes dwelling as a bodily need, as fundamental

as that of eating. Like the body, architecture may live, sicken, and die, needing nourishment

in the form of maintenance, and a doctor, in the form of a master-builder, to repair and cure

it.83 Filarete also invokes the process of parturition to explain the role of the architect. He

describes architect as the ‘mother’ of the building, the client as the ‘father,’ and process of

81 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, translated by John R. Spencer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. 82 “There is no doubt that architecture was invented by man, but we cannot be certain who was the first man to build houses and habitations. It is to be believed that when Adam was driven out of Paradise, it was raining. Since he had nothing else at hand to cover [himself], he put his hands over his head to protect himself from the rain. […] Since both food and shelter are necessary to the life of man, it is to be believed for this reason that after Adam had made a roof of his hands and had considered the need for his sustenance, he thought and contrived to make some sort of habitation to protect himself from the rain and also from the heat of the sun. When he recognized and understood his need, we can believe that he made some sort of shelter of branches, or a hut, or perhaps some cave where he could flee when he needed. If such were the case, it is probable that Adam was the first.” Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, 1.4v; p. 10. See also Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise. 83 “I will show you [that] the building is truly a living man. You will see what it must eat in order to live, exactly as it is with man. It sickens and dies or sometimes is cured of its sickness by a good doctor. […] You can say that a building does not sicken and die like a man. I say to you that a building does just that, for it sickens when it does not eat, that is, when it is not maintained and begins to fall off little by little exactly as a man [does] when he goes without food, and finally falls dead. This is exactly what the building does. If it has a good doctor when it becomes ill, that is, the master who mends and cures it, it [will] stand a long time in good state. This is obvious. I can attest to this, for the court of the Signoria of Milan was ill from lack of food and half dead, when at great expense, I restored it to health. Without this protection it would soon have been finished. You need to maintain it continually and to guard it from corruption and too much fatigue, because, as man becomes thin and ill from too much fatigue, so [does] the building. Through corruption, the body of the building rots like that of man.” Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, 1.6r; pp. 12-13.

Figure 10: The

origins of

architecture.

Filarete,

Treatise on

Architecture,

Book 1, Folio

4v.


design as requiring an appropriate period of gestation. Before the architect ‘gives birth’ in

the form of a small relief model, he should ‘dream about his conception,’ turning it over in his

mind.84

The metaphor of body as

building is further extended with

Filarete’s design for the House of

Vice and Virtue. Here, a statue of

Virtue stands atop a cylindrical

tower of seven storeys, representing

the four Cardinal and three

Theological Virtues, or alternatively,

the seven deadly sins. Ascending

through the building, one encounters

seven rooms devoted to the seven

Liberal Arts. In its division of

rooms and its circulation, the design

represents a programme of

instruction.

As Hanno-Walter Kruft

suggests, “Architecture becomes the

external representation of an

educational idea.”85 The design for

the House of Vice and Virtue can

also be read as an allegory of body

84 “The building is conceived in this manner. Since no one can conceive by himself without a woman, by another simile, the building cannot be conceived by one man alone. As it cannot be done without a woman, so he who wishes to build needs an architect. He conceives it with him and then the architect carries it. When the architect has given birth, he becomes the mother of the building. Before the architect gives birth, he should dream about his conception, think about it, and turn it over in his mind in many ways for seven to nine months, just as a woman carries her child in her body for seven to nine months. […] When this birth is accomplished, that is when he has made, in wood, a small relief design of its final form, measured and proportioned to the finished building, then he shows it to the father.” Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, 2.7v; pp. 15-16. 85 Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present, translated by Ronald Taylor, Elise Callander, and Antony Wood, London; Zwemmer, 1994, p. 55.

Figure 11: The House of Vice and Virtue. Filarete,

Treatise on Architecture, Book XVIII, Folio 144r.


interior. Spaces within the body are liable to corruption and decay; but so too does the

possibility of virtue lie within. Thus the avoidance of sin, and the attainment of virtue,

becomes a matter of navigating the body interior, ensuring that the lowly spaces avoided and

the virtuous spaces visited each in turn. The design echoes the practice of using imaginary

rooms as mnemonic devices that began during the Renaissance.86 More importantly, with

the building drawn using perspective section, Filarete is considered to have created a new

form of architectural representation.87 Filarete’s treatise was probably written in 1461-64,

at which time he lived in Milan. Since his work on the Ospedale Maggiore was nearing

completion, it is likely that he was aware of at least some of the medical texts available at the

time. Whether or not his creation of this new form of architectural representation was

inspired by anatomical images is not known. But use of sectional drawings became

significant for architects from that time onwards.

In the work of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, also written during the late fifteenth

century, the anthropomorphic principles of Vitruvius are given renewed impetus. Francesco

begins his treatise with a definition of architecture that grounds the use of the body in

Vitruvius. “As Vitruvius says, all the art and the ragione is extracted from the well

composed and proportioned human body.’”88 Francesco makes the analogy both more

explicit and more detailed than does Vitruvius through the extensive use of illustrations. In

notebooks produced throughout his working life, Francesco drew plans, facades,

entablatures, and even whole cities with human figures superimposed. The drawings

reinforce the importance of hierarchic relations, with those buildings occupying the position

of the head—the chancel of a church or the fortress in a town—having the greatest

importance. In one illustration, Francesco also shows a familiarity with anatomical

illustration as a skeleton is juxtaposed with a figure showing proportion. Francesco’s

application of measurements taken from the body is comprehensive, although in the

translation to drawings, he states that the architect must complement principles with talent

86 See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. 87 Wolfgang Lotz, Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture, translated by Margaret Breitenbach, Renate Franciscono, and Paul Lunde, Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1977. 88 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte miliatre, edited by Corrado Maltese and Livia Degrassi Maltese, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1967, Vol 1, p. 3. As cited in Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 107.


and experience. Since drawing (disegno) must be used to convey what cannot be

conveyed in words, the discretion and guidance of the artist is necessary in the application of

principles.

Both Filarete and Francesco di Giorgio utilise ornament as a means to convey social

hierarchy, describing the correct size and ornament of houses for a duke, bishop, gentleman,

merchant, artisan, and poor man or farmer. However, while Filarete describes these in

descending order, Francesco begins his list with the house for private persons, the least

important. This is justified by their temporal emergence, with small houses necessarily

coming before larger institutions. According to Onians, Francesco thus adopts a principle of

historical development in terms of growth likely to have been derived form Aristotle.89

Onians also attributes to Francesco the initiative of using cutaway drawings, evolving out of

his concern that in drawings, one part of a building will always be hidden by another.90 The

solution was to use drawings showing the interior and exterior at the same time.91 In

Daniele Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius of 1584, he states that with this drawing type,

showing the thickness of walls and the projections of every element, the architect is like a

physician who demonstrates the interior and exterior parts at the same time.92

In contrast to the more speculative treatises of Alberti, Filarete and Francesco di

Giorgio, those written during the sixteenth century provide more practically oriented

instruction on the interpretation of the orders. In the books of Sebastiano Serlio, published

from 1537 onwards, Vitruvian principles of decorum were interpreted through Christian

belief, with the Doric order posited for churches dedicated to founding saints, and the

89 Onians, Bearers of Meaning, pp. 165-176. 90 Onians, Bearers of Meaning, p. 175. 91 Onians argues that this was influenced by Aristotle, since Francesco states in his preface that for Platonic and Peripatetic philosophers, one of the best ways to analyse an unfamiliar object is to divide it into its parts. Onians, Bearers of Meaning, pp. 175-176. 92 Describing the last of the three kinds arrangement described by Vitruvius (ichnography, orthography, scenography) Barbaro writes: “From this third idea, called scenography (sciografia), from which great utility is derived, because through the description in the profile, we understand the thickness of walls, the projections of every element (membro), and in this the architect is like a physician who demonstrates all the interior and exterior parts of works.” Marcus Vitruvius, I Dieci Libri dell’Architettura di M. Vitruvio, tradutti e commentati da Monsig. Daneile Barbaro, Marcolini, Venice, 1584, p. 30; as cited in Marco Frascari, “A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration,” JAE 44/1, November 1990, pp. 11-19; p. 15.


Corinthian for those dedicated to the Virgin Mary.93 Originally trained as an artist, Serlio

brings to architecture the idea that knowledge of the interior is vital for the correct

representation of surface. For Serlio, the role of perspective was to represent the full

complexity of the body, not just the surface.94 This attitude, common among Renaissance

painters, meant that artists often composed a large part of the audience for anatomical

demonstrations. Through a knowledge of depth, Serlio interpreted the principle of decorum

as an aesthetic hierarchy, with buildings, like bodies, having parts that, while necessary for

sustaining life, must be shielded from view.95 The importance of interiority gave Serlio’s

idea of decorum a greater reliance upon natural order. Like Filarete, Serlio’s description of

the houses suitable for various classes of men begins with the poorest, thereby suggesting

that architecture’s distance from its natural origins was able to be expressed through

ornament.96 Serlio also applied principles of ornamental hierarchy according to a building’s

use, with the Tuscan order advocated for utilitarian structures on the edge of the city, such

as fortifications, gates, prisons, and aqueducts.97 Serlio solves the problem of conformity to

canon or convention by appeal to licentia, or licence, the freedom of the architect to

interpret the rules of antiquity.98 While the architect is able to choose according to what

93 Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura, (1537-51) Venice 1619, 4.6; p. 139. See also Kohane and Hill, “Decorum in architectural theory,” p. 68. 94 Sawday writes: “Anatomy and perspective shared a common tendency. Both, Serlio suggested, were concerned with volume rather than surface. Any attempt at rendering surface convincing without an understanding of volume was to be content with the ‘bare shew of superficiencies’ rather than the full complexity of the body functioning within space.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 86. 95 “For just as in the human body there are some parts that are noble and beautiful and others that are rather ignoble and ugly, but of which we have the greatest need and indeed would not be able to live without; so also in buildings there ought to be some parts that are respectable and honoured, and others less elegant, but without which the former could not be free and would lose part of their dignity and beauty. But just as the Blessed Lord has arranged our organs so that the most beautiful are in the most exposed and visible places, and the less attractive in hidden places, so too we, in building, will locate the main parts, which are to be looked at, in visible places, and the less beautiful as far from sight as possible. And in these latter parts we will put all the ugly things of the house, everything that might cause shame and uglify the most beautiful parts.” Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura, 2.2; as quoted in George Hersey, Pythagorean Palaces: Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976, pp. 113-114. 96 “For Serlio, such decorum of ornament was testimony to civility, with the representation of social gradations providing an architectural record of society’s distance from its rude origins. Social order both mirrored and was situated within natural order.” Kohane and Hill, “Decorum in architectural theory,” pp. 68-69. 97 Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura, 4.5; p. 127.; Kohane and Hill, “Decorum in architectural theory,” p. 68. 98 Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura, Book 4; p. 146v.; Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, p. 118.


pleases him most, licence remains limited by decorum, beyond which it veers into the

pejorative sense of licentioso.99 This experimentation with the orders depends upon the

mixing (mescolanza) of elements, extensively illustrated through details.

With both Andrea Palladio and his pupil Vincenzo Scamozzi, the importance of

decorum is less a matter of conformity to social custom as it is one of conformity to nature.

Palladio suggests that variation from common usage is acceptable if the result is beautiful or

natural.100 In Palladio’s Four Books ‘nature’ takes on an importance above that of the

historical and theoretical origins of architecture, providing guidance to the ancients in the

determination of detail. The role of the body as a model for architecture remains, but it acts

more as a guide to structural or constructional integrity than to proportion. Payne suggests

that Palladio and Scamozzi were influenced by the growing scientific interest in nature, such

as Giovanni Borelli’s studies of the mechanics of the body. While Palladio made extensive

use of the combined section/elevation, enabling both to be seen together in a single drawing,

it was Scamozzi who made the parallel with anatomy explicit:

“The section of the well proportioned building is like the anatomy of a human body. As in the latter one can see the connections between bones, the linkages of the nerves, and the intersections of the veins, with the covering of soft tissue; so in the former one can see the trimming of the columns, and walls, the interlocking of the cornices, the entwining of those things that ornament, and finally the shells that cover the internal parts.”101

The intention for Scamozzi is not so much function as its effect – the external appearance of

internal order, a combination of literary and scientific influence. But as Payne identifies, the

anatomised body provides a new correlate for architecture, affecting both its modes of

representation and its products. She writes:

99 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, Chapter 6. “Serlio’s architectural inventions stay within the boundaries of good licentia if and only if the character, aspirations, social/economic position, and professional activities of the patron or dedicatee find appropriate visible representation in large-scale architectural images.” p. 140. 100 Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture, translated by Isaac Ware, New York: Dover Publications; 1977; see also Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, p. 175. 101 Vincenzo Scamozzi, Discorsi sopra l’antichità di Roma di Vincenzo Scamozzi architetto vincentino, Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1582, p. 15. Translation and citation by Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, p. 235.


“The human paradigm has shifted into a scientific mode, where the internal workings of the body, invisible to the eye and yet accessible to the mind – dissected, charted, and analyzed in the laboratory – begin to attract attention and ultimately to take over as appropriate parallels for what happens inside walls and behind veneers.”102

By the eighteenth century, in the drawings of Giambattista Piranesi, anatomical

conventions had clearly been adopted for the depiction of architecture.103 Here temples of

ancient Rome appear like the flayed bodies of Vesalian anatomy, their archaeological

reconstruction replicating the stages of dissection of the human body. Rykwert has

described Piranesi’s etchings as “vast autopsies of the detritus of Roman magnificence.”104

Barbara Maria Stafford suggests that strategies used by Piranesi in the depiction of classical

ruins imitate the surgical practices of anatomical description.105 The use of holes in the sides

of buildings, like cuts or wounds, enable Piranesi to reveal their internal structure, while the

use of multiple images on the same plate, showing the same building at different levels of

construction, imitate the anatomical drawings of a body at different stages of dissection.106

102 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, p. 234. 103 John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, New York: New Haven: Pierpont Morgan Library ; Yale University Press, 1993. 104 Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, p. 62. 105 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. “Wielding the etcher’s needle like a scalpel, he applied surgical procedures taken, I believe, from medical illustrations, to turn the still living fabric of architecture inside out.” p. 59. 106 “It was perhaps from Cowper’s revision of Vesalius that Piranesi learned to mobilize the muscled architectural dead as écorchés. Flayed bodies became analogues for temples peeled of their marble. Once the rind was removed, they exhibited the fissures and channels of underlying rubblework. […] Piranesi, I believe, transplanted three ‘surgical’ strategies into the domain of archaeological publication. First, he made use of accidental holes or ‘wounds’ gaping in the sides of deteriorating masonry to allow glimpses of their internal structure, an otherwise concealed aspect of the building. […] Piranesi’s second ‘dissective’ strategy was to exhibit multiple images limblike on the same plate. Different stages of building, types of construction, ground elevations, and variable conditions of erosion necessitated a dual device. The edifice was dismembered piece by piece and paratactically recomposed. The parts, thus juxtaposed or inlaid, formed an assemblage. […] Like a surgeon, Piranesi responsibly sutured the certain to the conjectural, thereby allowing the seamed nature of the whole to show. In an anatomical fashion, he taught the viewer to estimate the unknown by knowledgeably judging a maze of isolated and scattered remains. Significantly, however, anatomization, or the visual separation of segments, was only the means to a larger end, the totality of the graphic ensemble. His ultimate aim was synthesis. The pried-apart limbs and members had to be reintegrated into the heroic span of views Piranesi thus helped his contemporaries to recontextualize the ruins of the past into the living organism of modern urban Rome.” Stafford, Body Criticism pp. 59-70.


The Authority of Texts

Throughout the Renaissance, a shift is evident away from the rhetorical conception of the

body and its translation into architecture, and toward a ‘scientific’ or analytic investigation of

both. This is further emphasised by the development and then proliferation of the use of

sections, adopting a variation on the rules of perspective in order to show a privileged view

of the interior of bodies and buildings.107 Beginning with Alberti, and his interest in

generating a unified and pleasing whole through compartition and concinnitas, there

appears to have been an increasing interest in the demonstration of architecture’s inner

workings. This also coincided with changes to the interpretation of ancient authority, with

the strict Vitruvian canon gradually being reconfigured, most notably by Serlio.108 These

changes to both architecture and anatomy occurred in context of the broader upheavals in

the relation between knowledge and authority during the Renaissance. On the one hand,

intellectual inquiry was gradually being wrested from the control of the Church, while on the

other, changes in the availability of Holy Scripture brought about by printing were being used

to challenge the position of the church as mediator of the word of God. Just as descriptions

of the material world by Copernicus and others were beginning to contradict what was

found in Scripture, so too the authority of the church was being challenged by Erasmus and

Luther. In the nineteenth century, Burckhardt viewed these changes as a manifestation of

Kant’s idea of creative genius, and of Hegel’s concept of progress.109 The Renaissance

came to be regarded as a turning point for Western civilisation, when men of science

managed to liberate knowledge from the control of the church. But early anatomy

demonstrations were not intended to challenge the authority of the church. They were

instead undertaken as a demonstration of the perfection of God’s creation, revealing the

presence of God in the mortal body. Aristotle’s ideas of design and teleology merged with

107 Jacques Guillerme and Heline Vérin, “The Archaeology of Section,” Perspecta 25, 1989, pp. 226-257. See also Christine McCarthy, “Drawing and Quartering, ‘Mort Safes and Dissection Rooms: Divisions of the anatomical and the abject criminality of the architectural section,” in Stephen Cairns and Philip Goad (eds.), Building Dwelling Drifting: Migrancy and the Limits of Architecture, papers from the third ‘Other Connections’ conference, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, 1997. 107 See Onians, Bearers of Meaning, passim. 108 See Onians, Bearers of Meaning, passim. 109 Jacob Burckhardt, The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, translated by James Palmes; edited by Peter Murray, London : Secker & Warburg, 1985.


the Platonic idea of the body as microcosm, revealing the body of man, created in God’s

own image, as the end or goal of the process of creation. Although the body was liable to

tempt the soul with earthly desires, it was nonetheless an expression of that soul in the world.

It is as a consequence of this view that the proscription against anatomising the human body

was relaxed, for nowhere else could the full perfection of God’s creation be seen. The body

was anatomised only as a means to better understand the soul contained therein.110

Although anatomical demonstrations did not represent a direct challenge to the authority

of the church, their acceptance required the negotiation of a variety of social and religious

prohibitions in relation to the body. While resulting in ever more precise articulations of

human anatomy, dissection involves a transgression of structures of unity, a violence against

the order of Nature.111 This is emphasised by the anatomists’ involvement with the legally

imposed violence of execution. By cutting up corpses, the anatomists were violating the

domain of the dead, an act which should have brought infamy and condemnation. What

made this necessary was the dangerous and mysterious nature of the body interior. Despite

its constant presence, the interior of the body is only visible at times of trauma or death. Its

presence is usually understood indirectly, via traces which find their way to the surface, that

are often indications of illness or disease. Using bodies already dead prevents the pain

caused by vivisection, and its association with torture.112 For the same reason, the common

scientific strategy of experimenting upon ones own body was denied the anatomists.113 The

bodies of criminals, deemed to have forfeited the privacy of their interior, become the focus

of an outwardly directed gaze. The corpse, laid bare by the anatomist, becomes a reflection

that alludes to our own interior.114

110 Cunningham argues that the primary intention of anatomists during the Renaissance was not the rejection of authority and tradition thought to impeded discovery, but was in fact to demonstrate the soul as the purpose of the body. “Every anatomist up to and well beyond the sixteenth century looked at the body as being, in one way or another, the instrument of the soul, and if they were interested in anatomizing it, it was because it was the instrument of the soul. […] The soul is what anatomizing was about.” Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, pp. 196-197. 111As Sawday explains “[…] a dissection might denote not the delicate separation of constituent structures, but a more violent ‘reduction’ into parts: a brutal dismemberment of people, things or ideas.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 1. 112 See Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 22-25, and passim. 113 “[…]the interior recesses of the body are not merely private to others, but peculiarly private – that is expressly forbidden – to the owner or inhabiter of the body.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 15. 114 Sawday writes: “[…] it is, perhaps, this very impossibility of gazing within our own bodies which makes the sight of the interior of other bodies so compelling. Denied direct experience of ourselves, we


What anatomists offered in exchange for violating the domain of the dead was a

knowledge of the body that could be used to preserve the health of other bodies. The body

was ‘conquered’ not only in terms of a discovery of its internal workings, but in terms in the

way that knowledge could be used to overcome the threat of ill health.115 Through both

demonstrations and publication, and thus through connection with the knowledge of the

Ancients, the social status of the physician was raised above that of the surgeon. While

surgeons were limited to operating on the outside of the body, physicians were able to use

knowledge of the body to reason from symptoms as to the internal, and hidden, cause of

disease, and then administer the correct cure.116 And while the upper classes revelled in the

spectacle of dissection, the lower classes were made acutely aware of the complicity

between medicine and the law. Since the bodies used for dissection were those of executed

criminals, the possibility arose for dissection to be imposed as part of the sentence.

Partitioning of the body already formed part of many death sentences, thus ensuring that

punishment extended beyond death. Previously, prevention of burial had been achieved

using a gibbett, a metal cage in which the body was suspended as it slowly decayed. Such

violent forms of punishment were intended to show a complicity between sovereign and

divine power.117 But dissection provided an alternative means to compromise the integrity

of the body. The retributions of justice were now complemented by the contribution to

knowledge, with criminals made to perform a public service even after death.118

Anatomy demonstrations, far from scientific investigations in any modern sense, were

instead complex rituals demonstrating various aspects of scientific, juridical, religious, and

textual authority in relation to the body. Yet Vesalius managed to dramatically transform the

very nature of that ritual, and with it, the relation between textual authority and direct visual

evidence. Vesalius’ rise to the position of professor was due only in part to the quality and

popularity of his work. As dissector, he began to challenge professorial authority,

can only explore others in the hope (or the fear) that this other might also be us.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 8. 115 Sawday writes: “[A]natomization takes place so that, in lieu of a formerly complete ‘body’, a new ‘body’ of knowledge and understanding can be created. […] The anatomist, then, is the person who has reduced one body in order to understand its morphology, and thus to preserve morphology at a later date, in other bodies, elsewhere.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 2. 116 Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 80. 117 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , passim. 118 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 55.


expressing opinions that were at variance with those given in the lecture. In one

demonstration, Vesalius was rebuked by the professor, Curtius. Confident in his

observations, Vesalius continued to follow his own course, much to the delight of the

students.119 The ensuing argument between them centred upon the difference between what

was ‘visible to the eyes’ and what was ‘evident to reason’ as taught by authority. For

Vesalius, the visible evidence of the body took priority over that of the text, enabling what

appeared in the text to be verified. While Curtius maintained that authority lay with Galen’s

text, Vesalius insisted that whatever was described be demonstrated by pointing to its

occurrence in the body. With the mode of demonstration initiated by Vesalius, he conveyed

the importance of direct visual experience, the idea that one should see for oneself (the literal

meaning of autopsy). Although challenging the authority of the text, Vesalius considered

himself faithful to Galen’s original project, even though his observations contradicted much

of what had been written. For he had realised the advantage he had over Galen, namely,

that he had access to human bodies for dissection, and was to develop for the first time a

comprehensive anatomy of the human body. Thus appeared the Fabrica, a detailed

description of the ‘fabric’ of the body, the material assembly from which can be determined

actions and uses.120 From Vesalius onwards, Renaissance anatomy consisted of direct

exploration of the material and functional aspects of the human body.

Cunningham suggests that rather than constituting an ‘anatomical Renaissance’ in which

the authority of the Church was rejected, developments in anatomy at that time appear to

have much in common with the Reformation. Challenges to the authority of the church

initiated by Erasmus and carried through by Luther centred upon the importance of

individual interpretation. For Luther, Christianity was a religion of personal engagement,

where it was each individual’s duty to read the Word of God available to them in the

bible.121 The bible, not the church, was the source of all authority.122 His was not a

119 Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, pp. 103-111. See also Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance, Aldershot, U.K.; Sydney: Ashgate, 1999, pp. 162-192. 120 It is, according to Cunningham, an ‘anatomy of structure’: “What Vesalius sees is the human body, built on and supported by the bones, to which the muscles are attached; it has great systems of vessels (the veins, arteries, and nerves).” The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 120. 121 This was in part due to the proliferation of texts made possible by the printing press, first produced around 1450. On the influence of printing, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.


rejection of Christian faith, but a stress on the importance of direct encounter with the Word,

the search for an authentic church based upon the direct participation of each of its

members. While there is no direct evidence to connect Vesalius with the reformed church,

Cunningham suggests that Vesalius’ innovations in anatomy reveal him to be acting in a

similar manner. For Vesalius, the body is a source of authority available to be read by

all.123 By encouraging a detailed examination of the body, both in demonstrations and in the

detail of his illustrations, Vesalius promotes an unmediated experience of the truth contained

within the body.124

In relation to architecture, what these changes suggest is that the two bodies identified in

Vitruvius – the ideal body and the vulnerable body – were beginning to merge, with

anatomical publications redefining the symbolic role of the body. In the use of sectional

drawings, architects appear to be demonstrating that their own skills were comparable with

those of physicians, and that the cosmic significance of the body, rather than being described

using circumscription, needed to be demonstrated through a detailed display of its inner

workings.125 What was also reconfigured during the Renaissance was the attitude to ancient

authority in the form of the Vitruvian canon. However, unlike anatomy, where the dissected

body provided an alternative to Galen’s text, there was no new referent for architecture. In

the ensuing centuries, critical debate about architecture centred upon the extent to which

architects were able to interpret the rules of antiquity. While the judgement of the anatomists

was crucial for interpreting the ‘text’ of the body without referring to Galen, reinforced by

122 “In his confrontation with the defenders of the Catholic Church, Luther’s challenge was always for them to show—to literally point out with their finger—the texts in the bible on which their claims were built. Only this would count as authority to Luther.” Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 218. 123 “Now, with Vesalius, the body is the text. The body is a better text than Galen, and where Galen differs from the text of the body, then Galen must be ignored. The true text, the text of the human body, is in front of one’s eyes at the demonstration, and all those attending it have a duty to read it for themselves.” Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 121. 124 “Not only does Vesalius insist on the primacy of ‘the Word,’ that is, the body, over written text and tradition but, like Luther with the Bible, he introduces touching and pointing, into both the practice of public anatomizing and its visual representation, as aids to witnessing the truth for oneself.” Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, p. 227. 125 In his history of prison architecture in England, Robin Evans writes: “Acting in the character of an architect meant the adoption of techniques which allowed a proposal to be laid forth for examining in the absence of the building itself, above all in the form of a drawing. Plans, sections and elevations – the principal tools of the profession – made it possible to see a building from a distance and yet to see its multifarious internal workings at a glance; to survey it from an abstracted, privileged vantage point as if it were a dissected body, and to see it so before the fact of its construction.” Robin Evans, The


ever more detailed interpretation of the human body, the judgement of architects was

without referent, and no matter how ingenious the interpretation of rules, came to be viewed

with suspicion. The only alternative to the authority of Vitruvius was the ‘discretion and

guidance’ of the architect. On the one hand, architects such as Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio

sought to consolidate the rules of antiquity into pattern books of orders, while on the other,

Mannerist architects were testing the limits of those rules through distortion and exaggeration

of proportions. Michelangelo’s stair for the Laurentian Library, for example, constructed in

the 1550’s, takes on grotesque dimensions as it fills the vestibule, and like the viscera in the

Vesalian images, threatens to spill out of the body in which it is contained. For architects of

the Baroque, free interpretation of rules was to be revelled in. Guarino Guarini, for example,

stated that “Architecture can correct the rules of antiquity and invent new ones.”126

Baroque architecture is clearly inspired by the complexity of the human interior revealed by

dissection. However, like the drawings of Vesalius, Baroque bodies are very much alive,

the rich folds of surface serving to represent the souls contained within.127

Science and Method

Without an objective referent to replace the authority of the ancients, architecture

became susceptible to the dramatic change brought about by the increasing status of

scientific knowledge. Leonardo Benevolo, in his historical account of Renaissance

Architecture, describes the emergence of modern science as constituting a ‘crisis of

sensibility.’128 Architecture, like many other practices, was being fragmented by a division

of labour. The various tasks described by Vitruvius as being the province of the architect—

surveying, mechanical constructions, hydraulics and fortifications—became specialised

disciplines detached from architecture. This reflected a wider division, the well known

separation occurring between science and the arts. The increasing precision of the

Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750 - 1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 45. 126 As cited in Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory, p. 106. 127 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, passim. 128 Leonardo Benevolo, The Architecture of the Renaissance,2 vols., translated by Judith Landry, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, vol. 2, p. 585ff.


description of the world in material terms was seen as having a more reliable access to truth.

Correspondingly, whatever could not be studied in scientific terms was relegated to the

realm of art. “The rise of science” writes Benevolo, “removed from the system of the arts its

main argument for stability and social utility, i.e. its value as a vehicle for knowledge; artistic

mimesis could no longer be the imitation of reality and had to become the imitation of

emotions.”129 The effect upon architecture of this division was less extensive that upon

other arts such as painting or music. This was due not only to the usual resistance to change

caused by socio-technical methods of architectural production, but also to its lack of

representational content. And since architecture could not direct the emotions as effectively

as other arts, the crisis was manifest mostly in contentious differences in the ‘guidance’ of the

architect. Benevolo explains:

“In reality the crisis of architectural culture, which was coming to a head during the 1620’s, consisted in the collapse of the objective criteria of choice typical of recent tradition; these objective criteria were replaced not by other criteria of the same kind, but by tendentious proposals, and often by a number of conflicting and complementary ones; the outcome of this crisis was not the formation of a new common repertoire, as an alternative to the previous one, but the start of a debate for an indefinite period.”130

This crisis is seen to result from the increasing influence of science at the time,

particularly with the publications of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, and Descartes in the early

seventeenth century, describing the natural world of the earth and other planets. These ideas

were reinforced by inventions such as the pocket watch, which allowed more precise

divisions and measurements of objects, of space, and of time. Yet the methods and

metaphors for all of these forms of scientific inquiry were heavily influenced by the

anatomisation of the body. This is particularly evident in the work of René Descartes.

Descartes was familiar with the work of Vesalius, and spent eleven years in Amsterdam at a

time when public anatomy was at its peak.131 Descartes did not, however, engage in these

anatomies, but instead resorted to the dissection of animal carcasses. In both his

philosophical descriptions of the body and the mind it contained, and in his enumerations of

129 Benevolo, The Architecture of the Renaissance, p. 594. 130 Benevolo, The Architecture of the Renaissance, p. 596. 131 G. A. Lindeboom, Descartes and Medicine, Amsterdam : Rodopi, 1979.


scientific method, the influence of dissection is readily apparent. Descartes’ partitioning of

the world into objects (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans), occurs most profoundly at the

level of the body. The identity of the individual, the formerly complete unity of body and

soul, is separated. Moreover, the separation is based upon the body’s susceptibility to

partitioning through dissection.

The body, relegated to the world of objects, is seen to act solely in accordance with the

laws of mechanics. And like a machine, the body could best be understood by taking it

apart. Anything that was too complex to understand as a whole could be partitioned into its

constituent elements. Thus partitioning, as a method of inquiry, became central to

Descartes’ work. As a ‘rule’ of method, he stated that he would “[…] divide each difficulty

I should examine into as many parts as possible, and as would be required the better to

solve it.”132 Although Descartes is remembered for formalising scientific method, the idea of

partitioning was not new. Walter Ong has argued that ‘method’ emerged in response to the

problem of the systematic organisation of knowledge.133 While the arrangement of elements

of discourse was necessitated by the invention of printing, the patterns of spatialisation and

ordering were derived from the anatomised body. “[The] ordering of discourse was akin to

the progressive partitioning of the body in anatomical demonstration, and thus indebted to a

language of the body at every point.”134

The revolution in the anatomical understanding of the human body epitomised by

Vesalius’ texts is a visible manifestation of a deeper revolution. Practitioners of anatomy

emerged victorious in the confrontation between ancient texts and their own methods of

direct visual evidence. With approval from the church, the anatomists managed to

132 The principles stated in the Discourse on the Method are as follows: “The first was never to accept anything as true if I had not evident knowledge of its being so; that is, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to embrace in my judgement only what presented itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it. The second, to divide each problem I examined into as many parts as was feasible, and as was requisite for its better solution. The third, to direct my thoughts in an orderly way; beginning with the simplest objects, those most apt to be known, and ascending little by little, in steps as it were, to the knowledge of the most complex; and establishing an order in thought even when the objects had no natural priority to another. And the last, to make throughout such complete enumerations and such general surveys that I might be sure of leaving nothing out.” Rene Descartes, Philosophical writings, a selection translated and edited by Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach, London: Nelson, 1954, pp. 20-21. 133 Walter Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. 134 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 136.


overcome taboos against the violation of corpses, offering in return a graphic demonstration

of the wonder of God’s creation. The delicate process of dissecting a body gave rise to an

entirely new mode of investigation, involving a systematic procedure of partitioning the

subject and recording the results. Dissection of the body provided the model for the

organisation of knowledge. This gave rise to a whole new series of metaphors, allying

intellectual clarity with the visual clarity that penetrated the body, unoccluded by the veil of

skin.135 In the analytic method of simplification through partition, described by Descartes,

the influence of dissection is palpable. Similarly, the scientific process of the tabulation of

information mimics the act of reducing a whole body to parts which are then arrayed across

the dissection table.136 In this way, the process of partitioning and describing the fabric of

the body was replicated in the study of the natural world.

One of the aims of the study of the natural world was to describe the various forms of

beauty to be found within it. In his Dissertation sur les variétés naturelles, published

posthumously in 1791, the Dutch physician Petrus Camper presented studies of the facial

geometry of both humans and animals.137 Camper, one of most important anatomists of the

eighteenth century, sought to provide rules whereby artists and architects, whose task was

the representation of nature, would be able to convey all types of emotions. Camper’s

135 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991, p. 54, and passim. Stafford writes: “Anatomy and its inseparable practice of dissection were the eighteenth-century paradigms for any forced, artful, contrived, and violent study of depths. Metaphors of decoding, dividing, separating, analyzing, fathoming permeated ways of thinking about, and representing, all branches of knowledge from religion to philosophy, antiquarianism to criticism, physiognomics to linguistics, archaeology to surgery. Analogies of dissection, specifically, functioned on two interrelated levels. The literal, corporeal sense derived from tactile cuts inflicted by actual instruments. Digging knives, invading scissors, sharp scalpels mercilessly probed to pry apart and distinguish muscle from bone. The figurative sense played upon the allusion to violent and adversarial jabbing. Such excavation stood for an investigative intellectual method that uncovered the duplicity of the world. Discursive thought called upon powers of baring abstraction whereby the lowly particular was mentally separated from the elevated generality. The trivial predicate was severed from the significant subject, the unimportant individual was subtracted from the important universal. Both meanings shared the connotation of a searching operation performed on a recalcitrant substance. One involved manual probing, the other cerebral grasping. Each suggested the stripping away of excess by decomposition and fragmentation for the purpose of control.” p. 47. 136 This relationship is central to Foucault’s investigation of taxonomy. He writes: “I use that word ‘table’ in two superimposed senses: the nickel-plated, rubbery table swathed in white, glittering beneath a glass sun devouring all shadow – the table where, for an instant, perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine; and also a table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their difference – the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” The Order of Things, p. xvii.


work signals the beginnings of nineteenth-century anthropological and phrenological

research, and also the beginnings of modern comparative anatomy. The study of the face,

physiognomy, had been codified in the sixteenth century by Giambattista della Porta, but it

was the images of Charles Le Brun, chancellor then rector of the French Academy of

Painting in the late seventeenth century, that inspired Camper.138 Le Brun’s pathognomy

was based upon Descartes’ theory of the passions, where the surface of the body was seen

as a register for emotions originating in the pineal gland, the seat of the soul. The interest in

physiognomy by Camper and Le Brun was based on the perceived unity of geometry and

expression, and the idea that expression was a register of character.139

Physiognomy formed part of the variety of studies of the expressive qualities of the body

through both expression and gesture, the use of the face and hands to adopt the conventions

of rhetoric. Yet while gesture belonged to the intentional construction of discourse, the face

was seen as an involuntary register of the passions of the soul. Physiognomy is less

concerned with the face as a means of intentional expression than as a visible manifestation

of inner character, a kind of natural language of emotions. Le Brun’s drawings emphasise

this natural aspect of the face by describing character not through expression, but through

visual analogy with various animals. These are passive subjects whose temperament is

conveyed as they take on the appearance of a cat, fox, boar, owl, eagle, or camel. Through

the adoption of classification methods of natural history and art, Le Brun thus presents a

kind of taxonomy of the emotions, an ordering of character according to facial geometry.140

Transformed into a natural phenomenon, the inner nature of a human being was to be

explained according to mathematical and scientific principles, reducing the great diversity of

souls into a limited range of personality ‘types.’141

137 Petrus Camper, Dissertation sur les variétés naturelles qui caractérisent la physiognomie des homme des divers climats et des différens âges, Paris and the Hague, 1791. 138 Giambattista della Porta De Humana Physiognomonia, Naples, 1586; Charles Le Brun, Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière des passions, Paris, 1698. On Della Porta and Le Brun, see also See also Patrizia Magli, “The Face and the Soul,” Zone 4, 1989, pp. 87-127; and Rykwert, The Dancing Column, pp. 36-56. 139 On ‘character’ in architecture, see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. 140 Jean-François Bédard, “The Measure of Expression: Physiognomy and Character in Lequeu’s ‘Nouvelle Méthode’,” Chora 1, 1994, pp. 35-56. 141 On type in architecture, see Anthony Vidler, “The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic Ideal, 1750-1830,” Oppositions 8, 1977, pp. 94-115; also Micha Bandini, “Typology as a Form


Character and the French Academy

Le Brun’s ideas of the expressive nature of the face found their way into architecture via

his friend, Claude Perrault. Perrault was active in scientific circles; originally trained as a

comparative anatomist, he was also a founding member of the French Royal Academy of

Science. Claude, along with his brother Charles, was active in the ‘Dispute of the Ancients

and Moderns,’ in which the authority of ancient texts was challenged by the possibility of

discovering scientific knowledge through direct investigation of nature.142 In the

Ordonnance, Perrault called into question the idea that the laws of proportion were given

by Nature, instead arguing that they were determined by custom and tradition.143 Instead,

Perrault sought to bring to architecture the same rational principles that were being adopted

in science, establishing a system of proportions for the orders based upon empirical

evidence.144 Troubled by the variance between different categorisations of the orders in

Vitruvius and Renaissance treatises, Perrault sought to establish a system of architectural

proportions that was as universal and practical as any scientific law. In doing so, Perrault

rejected the idea that the body was a source of proportion, thereby disconnecting

architecture from its symbolic connotations, its relation to the macrocosm via the microcosm

of the body. He also introduced the idea that beauty could arise from the use for which a

building is intended (‘usage’), making way for later theories of function. Despite Perrault’s

interest in the universal nature of mathematical laws, his prescriptions for proportion and

beauty give the orders an internal consistency, making them more a series of technical

instructions for composition than a means to impart meaning to architecture.145

of Convention,” AA Files 6, May 1994, pp. 73-82; Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13, Summer 1978, pp. 22-45; G. C. Argan, “On the Typology of Architecture,” translated by Joseph Rykwert, Architectural Design. December 1963, pp. 564-565; Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typology,” Oppositions 7, 1976, pp. 1-4; Anthony Vidler, “The Production of Types,” Oppositions 8, 1977, p. 93. 142 Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Ancients et Modernes, 4 vols., Paris, 1692-1696. 143 Claude Perrault, Ordonnance des Cinq Espèces de Colonnes, Paris, 1683. 144 On Perrault, see Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983, especially Chapter 1, “Claude Perrault and the Instrumentalization of Proportion.” 145 “Architectural proportion lost in Perrault’s system its quality of absolute truth. Numbers no longer had their traditional magic power, their connotations as an essential form of divine revelation. Perrault was thus able to reduce the problem to the immanent discourse of reason, and at the same time question


For over a hundred years, discourse at the

Academy was dominated by the argument

between rationalisation and the authority of

tradition. Perrault’s greatest critic was

Jacques-François Blondel, whose Cours

d’Architecture was the first textbook for

students of the Academy.146 Blondel argued

against Perrault’s rejection of custom,

reaffirming the significance of proportion as

the key to beauty. Although supporting the

normative role of the body, Blondel, in

referring to the theories of various

Renaissance architects, noted the importance

of personal expression and decision in the

interpretation of rules. While proportion and

geometry ensured ‘positive’ or absolute

beauty, interpretation was necessitated by the

variety of building types–Blondel describes

sixty-four of them–that might be encountered

by an architect. The various types were to be dealt with using different expressive qualities

suitable to architecture, such as sublime, noble, virile, light, elegant, delicate, mysterious,

grand, bold, terrifying, and so on.147 These and other ‘characters’ were listed by Blondel as

the appropriate expression of mood or emotion for a particular work of architecture,

proportion’s immemorial role as the ultimate justification of praxis.” Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, p. 31. 146 Blondel, Cours d’architecture, ou traité de la décoration, distrubution & construction des bâtiments, Paris, 1771-7. 147 Forty, Words and Buildings, p. 122. See also Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory. “[Blondel] associates temples with décence, public buildings with grandeur, monuments with somptuosité, promenades with élegance, etc.” Thus, Kruft writes, “[for] Blondel, the use of ornament is not an arbitrary matter; it must be determined by expressive function.” p. 149.

Figure 12: Jean-Jacques Lequeu,

Symbolic Order for the Chamber of

Estates of a National Palace, 1789. As

published in Duboy, Lequeu: An

Architectural Enigma, p. 315.


thereby indicating its purpose or use.148 Blondel also applied the principle of character to

individual rooms, with the exterior decoration is seen to announce the interior ‘distribution’

of the building.149 Blondel’s ideas follow on from those of Germain Boffrand, who

introduced the idea of caractère in his Livre d’Architecture of 1745. According to

Boffrand, the role of the architect is to know these different characters, and to make them

felt in his work. Derived from Horace’s Ars Poetica, the principle of character brings to

architecture rules of expression that require fidelity to the nature of the inhabitant or use of

the building. “Different buildings,” writes Boffrand, “by their arrangement, by their

construction, and by the way they are decorated, should tell the spectator their purpose; and

if they do not, they offend against the rules of expression and are not as they ought to

be.”150

Inspired by the writings and teachings of Boffrand and Blondel, the idea of character

continued to be invoked well into the eighteenth century. Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières

urged that Le Brun’s principles of characterising the passions be applied to architecture.151

Jean-Jacques Lequeu, who published his Nouvelle Méthode in 1792, was preoccupied by

the expressive possibilities of physiognomy, making extensive studies of faces and facial

features.152 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux also used the principle of caractère, in combination

with social ideals borrowed from Rousseau, in the series of houses designed according to

the occupations of their inhabitants.153

148 “All the different sorts of architectural production should bear the imprint of the particular purpose of each building, all should have a character determining their general form, and announcing the building to be what it is.” J.-F. Blondel, Cours d’Architecture, vol 2, pp. 229-230; as cited in Forty, Words and Buildings, p. 122. 149 Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory, p. 148. 150 Germain Boffrand, Livre d’Architecture, Paris, 1745, p. 16; as cited in Forty, Words and Buildings, p.121. 151 Le Génie de l’architecture, ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (Paris, 1780) translated as The Genius of Architecture, or the Analogy of that Art with our Sensations, Translated by D. Britt, Santa Monica: Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992. 152 Bédard, “The Measure of Expression.” See also Philippe Duboy, Lequeu: An Architectural Enigma, translated by Francis Scarfe, London: Thames and Hudson, 1986; Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment, Princeton, N.J: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. 153 L’Architecture de Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, edition Ramee, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1983. See also Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and social reform at the end of the Ancien Regime, Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, 1990.


This interest in the expressive nature of architecture formed a connection to Vitruvian

principles of decorum, although in a diminished form. As Vesely identifies, theories of

character demonstrate a tendency to move toward the surface of a building, toward the

‘experience of appearances,’ and away from the representation of depth, an outward

expression of the order of reality.154 This interest in surface, while emphasising the need for

correspondence between interior and exterior, is won at the expense of the connection to

symbolic order. This disconnection is further emphasised as interest in the expressive nature

of the face inspired by physiognomy served to reduce interest in the body as a whole.155

For the French Academy, the interest in the body moved away from the symbolic unity of

Vitruvian Man, and toward the classificatory systems being developed at the time for the

study of nature, especially Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae of 1748.156 The systematic

recording of species of plants or animals was both comprehensive and open ended; it gave

order to what was known, and promised a glimpse of the unknown, of those species whose

existence was suggested by the gaps in the tabulation.157 The influence of taxonomy meant

that the body could no longer be understood through a canonical or symbolic model, but

must instead be understood via a comprehensive knowledge of each of its possible variants.

Taxonomy’s influence upon architecture is particularly evident in the work of Jacques-

Nicolas-Louis Durand. Durand taught at the École Polytechnique, which had replaced the

Academy following the French Revolution. Durand’s best known publication, the Recueil

et Parallèle des Edifices, shows a range of great works of architecture, all drawn to the

same scale, grouped according to function.158 No distinction is made between the cultural

or historical origins of each of the works, and their arrangement makes them appear like the

154 “In character we can see quite clearly a tendency to move towards the surface of a building, an interior or a garden, towards the experience of appearances, while in convenance and bienséance there is a tendency to move into the depth of architectural reality, towards an order still understood in terms of ethos.” Vesely, “Architecture and the Poetics of Representation,” p. 28. 155 Rykwert, The Dancing Column, pp. 47-48. 156 Linne, Carl von, Systema naturae, Lipsiae: Impensis Godofr. Kiesewetteri, 1748. 157 “[Taxonomy] implied the possible existence of a transformational or combinatorial principle, whereby the classification might be extended, beyond the known species, either to indicate the positions of species still undiscovered or lost in the past, or else, even more exciting, to generate theoretical species of kinds unknown to nature.” Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, p. 24. 158 Jacques-Nicolas-Louis Durand , Recueil et Parallèle des Edifices de Tout Genre, Anciens et Modernes, Paris, 1801; also J.N.L. Durand, Précis des Leçons d’Architecture, Paris, 1802. On Durand’s influence and theories, see Sergio Villari, J.N.L. Durand (1760-1834): Art and Science of Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1990.


specimens of a naturalist collector.159 Durand explicitly rejected the role of the body, stating

that “[…] the proportions of the human body have not served, nor could have served, as a

model for the architectural orders.”160 Durand also denied the importance of character,

suggesting that it would result automatically from solving the disposition of the plan according

to the building’s use. With this rejection of architecture’s symbolic function, argues Pérez-

Gómez, Durand reduced the entire value system of architecture down to the two factors of

convenience and efficiency, intended only to achieve the provision of comfort and the

avoidance of pain.161

With the Recueil presenting great works of architecture as exemplars of composition,

the Précis presents students with a means to emulate them in the form of a method for

combining elements together. The first part describes columns, walls, openings, roofs, and

other elements according to their proportion and materials of construction, while the second

part describes rules for positioning them on a grid, with objects located on grid lines and

openings at their mid-points. Devoid of historical or symbolic referent, the problem of

design was reduced to a meaningless game of combination, whose meaning was derived

only from the process itself.162

While the grid system facilitated symmetry and regularity, it neglected any treatment of

hierarchy, either within each work, or in relation to their place in the social order. This loss

of hierarchy, and the loss of the body as a referent in general, meant that the unity of the

work, the end or purpose for which the parts were brought together, is no longer given.

Although ideas of unity had been rendered problematic by the penetration of vision into

bodies and buildings, Durand’s method denies the idea of unity as a necessary and sufficient

combination of parts. His drawings avoid entirely the depiction of the interior as a privileged

159 “The plans of large numbers of historical buildings, grouped according to their general functions—theatres, stadia, markets, and so on—are set out in the plates of Durand’s Recueil et Parallèle des Edifices of 1801, all drawn to common scales, arranged like nothing so much as the specimens for some work of natural history or geology.” Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, p. 29. 160 Durand, Précis, Vol. 1, p. 14. As cited in Villari, J.N.L. Durand, p. 66. 161 “For Durand, economy and efficiency were not a limitation, but sources of inspiration. They became the only acceptable values of architecture. And as long as the work fulfilled its program, it would be pleasant. The idea of efficiency is a functional relation: to achieve a maximum result with a minimum effort, with maximum economy. The system of values in architecture was thus reduced to a scale between pleasure and pain.” Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, p. 303. 162 Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, p. 304.


view into a unified whole, and instead appear merely as diagrams showing the relative

position of the various elements.163

Durand’s work proved extremely influential, with several reprints and translations

produced throughout the nineteenth century. His rejection of the symbolic significance of the

orders can be seen as the beginning of the functionalisation of architecture, the derivation of

designs solely according to their intended use. Although obviously influenced by

contemporary political events, changes in attitude to authority and tradition indicated by

Durand’s work can also be seen to relate to changes in the scientific conception of the body.

The shift from a direct investigation of the fabric of the body to a study of its variations within

a taxonomic system meant that the role of the body as model for architecture’s symbolic

unity was no longer tenable. The rejection of the body meant that there was no metaphorical

referent to establish principles of order and meaning in relation to architecture, no way to

address the difficulties occasioned by the dualities of part and whole, unity and

fragmentation, surface and depth. While the idea of ‘function’ relates back to Aristotle’s

conception of an inner teleology, by the nineteenth century the idea of function meant only

use.164 The soul, although central to all previous discourse about the body, was largely

absent from nineteenth century scientific discourse. In the work of Lambert-Adolphe-

Jacques Quételet, for example, with which Durand was familiar, evidence of a Divine Mind

was to be found in the probabilities and numerical distributions seen to govern bodies, and

not in the bodies themselves.165 The explanation for this elision, I believe, lies in the

163 “The single, entire, and well-finished Palladian body, already reeling under the blows of the baroque principle of hierarchy, is shattered now by the nearly serial composition of its elements. In particular the architectural space explodes, fracturing itself, its supposedly eternal indissolubility threatened at the core.” Villari, J.N.L. Durand, p. 61. 164 Joseph Rykwert has argued that the principle of ‘form follows function’ in fact originates in a concern for modelling surface in accordance with internal conditions of material and force. Along with the idea of ‘organic’ architecture, the relation between form and function is generally attributed to the eighteenth century Franciscan friar, Carlo Lodoli, passing via Francesco Milizia’s Lives of Famous Architects to Horation Greenough, then to Louis Sulivan and on to Frank Lloyd Wright. However, Rykwert explains that for Lodoli, ‘organic’ referred primarily to the human body, and ‘function’ meant the mechanical working of forces within the structure translated into graphic terms. See Joseph Rykwert, “Lodoli on Function and Representation,” in The Necessity of Artifice, London: Academy Editions, 1982, pp. 115-121. On Lodoli, see also Marco Frascari, “Function and Representation in Architecture,” Design Methods and Theories 19/1, 1985, pp. 200-216. 165 Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quételet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties, London, 1842. On Quételet’s influence upon Durand, see Bédard, “The Measure of Expression.”


research into respiratory processes that followed on from Vesalius, eventually connecting the

study of the heart to the atmospheric chemistry of the eighteenth century.

Respiration and Vital Spirits

While Vesalius’ Fabrica had provided a comprehensive description of various parts of

the body, it raised a great number of questions as to their operation and purpose. One of

the most compelling issues for anatomists was the working of the heart, understood as the

source of life, providing blood for all the other organs. In particular, differences in the size

and type of blood contained in the connections between heart and lungs could not readily be

accounted for. The groundwork for an explanation was to be provided by Hieronymus

Fabricius ab Aquapendente, chair of anatomy at Padua in the late sixteenth century.166

Fabricius’ study of the ostiola, the so-called valves in veins, was to prove valuable for his

student, William Harvey, in the latter’s description of the circulation of the blood, published

after he returned to England. Harvey managed to show that the blood, rather than being

produced and consumed in different parts of the body, circulated through it, driven by the

action of the heart. Although this description gave support to emerging mechanistic

descriptions of the body, Harvey remained staunchly Aristotelian, regarding his discovery as

confirmation of the heart’s role as the ‘fountain’ of life for the body.167As Sennett has

shown, the idea of circulation was to prove highly influential in the planning an design of

cities.168 But neither Fabricius nor Harvey had managed to explain the connection between

heart and lungs, known as the ‘pulmonary transit’ of the blood. The difficulty here lay not in

variation from Galenic texts, but in its potential contradiction with the Bible. The Bible

taught that the blood was the seat of the soul, and the soul was breathed into man by God.

166 On Fabricius, see Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, Chapter 6. See also Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 183-215. 167 “[...] it comes to pass in the body, that all the parts are nourished, cherished, and quickned with blood, which is warm, perfect, vaporous, full of spirit, and [...] alimentative: in the parts the blood is refrigerated, coagulated, and made as it were barren, from thence it returns to the heart, as to the fountain or dwelling-house of the body, to recover its perfection, and there again by naturall heat, powerfull, and vehement, it is melted, and is dispens’d again through the body from thence, being fraught with spirits, as with balsam, and that all the things do depend upon the motional pulsation of the heart.” William Harvey, An Anatomical Essay Concerning the Movement of the Heart and the Blood in Animals, 1628; as cited in Porter, The Greatest benefit to Mankind, pp. 211-212.


A correct description of the pulmonary transit involved identifying the lungs, not the heart,

as the place where the blood was mixed with air (spirit). This was first postulated by

Michael Servetus in 1553, in his work The Restoration of Christianity. Servetus was

consequently condemned for heresy and burnt at the stake. Servetus’ idea was soon

confirmed by Realdo Columbo, Vesalius’ successor at Padua, in his posthumous publication

of 1559, On Anatomy.

Descartes dismissed the Aristotelian foundation of Harvey’s work, arguing instead for

the mechanical consequences of circulation. The heart was seen as an engine, providing the

motive force for the rest of the body. The heart was no longer seen as the source of life:

instead it merely allowed the vital force in the blood to circulate throughout the body.169 But

if this were the case, Harvey’s followers were to ask, where was the life force coming from?

The relationship of the heart with the lungs suggested that the life force was to be found

outside the body: so in the seventeenth century, the scientific study of air was to take on a

particular significance. The importance of air to living creatures was graphically

demonstrated by Robert Boyle. Boyle used a bell jar to create a vacuum into which birds

and animals were placed. The creatures would soon perish, or be miraculously brought

back to life as the air was replaced.170 In An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

(1768), Joseph Wright of Derby used this demonstration to depict the power of the scientist

over life and death.171

168 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, Chapter 8. 169 Rene Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical works of Descartes, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, London, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 333-336. 170 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 220-222. Similar experiments, by Robert Hooke and Richard Lower, challenged the view that the lungs were a kind of bellows designed to cool the fiery heart. Since a candle would also be extinguished by a vacuum, life was seen as a form of combustion, reliant upon the air for nourishment. The lungs transferred that nourishment from the air into the blood; the heart merely distributed the enlivened blood around the body. 171 Erica Langmuir, The National Gallery Companion Guide, London: National Gallery Company, 1994, p. 329-330. This experiment was typical of the science-based home entertainment popular in the eighteenth century. See also Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.


Figure 13: Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768. (British National

Gallery)

But exactly what the air contained would only be identified with the advances in gas

chemistry during the eighteenth century. Not until 1775 was oxygen identified, named by

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, but also isolated by Joseph Priestly and Karl Wilhelm

Scheele.172 The history of gas chemistry has traditionally been told in scientific terms, as

laboratory discoveries, hampered by the erroneous positing of phlogiston by Georg Ernst

Stahl. But what phlogiston provided was an explanation of the vital force of the air, and its

susceptibility to depletion. Similarly, the gases identified by Lavoisier and others were to

provide an explanation of the respiratory process, the form of combustion by which animal

heat was generated. Some resistance to mechanical and chemical descriptions of life were

provided by vitalists, most notably Albrecht von Haller, for whom the physical body was

animated by an immaterial soul. However, the relation to physiology meant that even for the

vitalists, the soul was understood naturalistically, not religiously, as a life force shaping

172 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 252-254.


growth and regeneration.173 Some considered the force of life to be in the nerves, not the

veins; work by Luigi Galvani and Allesandro Volta, pioneers of electrophysics and

electrochemistry, began by demonstrating the movement of muscles in animals by electrical

impulse. But as a vital force, electricity simulated life only as movement, and there was no

apparent ambient force supplying the body. Franz Anton Mesmer’s use of magnets to cure

patients led him to believe that he had discovered a vital ‘aetherial fluid,’ that he called

‘animal magnetism.’174 The importance of gas chemistry, however, was that it not only

identified the source of the vital force, it also connected scientific study of the body to a long

history of speculation about disease. At the time, inspired by the classification of natural

systems, physicians were striving to develop a comprehensive classification of disease

(nosology). Studies of the air held a promise of identifying, and thereby curing, airborne

diseases.175

These changes to the conception of the body were to have a dramatic effect upon

architecture. Discourse on the body in terms of its symbolic function, as a visible

representation of appropriate relation to social and natural order evident in principles of

decorum and character, had been lost in the few short centuries from Alberti to Durand.

Following Durand’s rejection of the body as the source of the orders, discourse turned to

the functional and therapeutic relations between bodies and buildings. Instead of the

symbolic body of Vitruvian Man, the body of modernism will be seen to be one that is

characterised by scientific values of health and hygiene, purity and efficiency. It is to this

body, and its dependence upon circulation, ventilation, and mechanical servicing, which we

now turn.

173 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 250-252. 174 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 285-286. Patients treated in this way went into convulsive fits by which they were supposedly cured; others became ‘mesmerised’ in a hypnotic trance. See also Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 175 As Porter writes: “These inquiries also led to attempts to measure the salubrity of the atmosphere, with a view to purifying the noxious air of towns and fetid buildings. Pneumatic chemistry, it was hoped, held the key not just to environmental medicine, but to therapeutics.” Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 254.

Chapter 3 Evident Virtues:

Modern Architecture and the Hygienic Body

The machine we live in is an old coach full of tuberculosis.

Le Corbusier1

The growth of scientific knowledge in the French Academies was an essential part of the

broader social and political changes characteristic of Enlightenment Europe. With the

overthrow of the ancien regime and the establishment of political systems based upon

‘rational’ principles, human relations were transformed. These transformations were

reflected in the structure and layout of cities, as public spaces and monuments were adapted

to reflect new ideals of freedom and equality. Yet the biggest change to cities came not

from new political systems, but from the application of scientific knowledge to the

production of goods. Machines used to harness the latent energy of fossil fuels and direct it

toward manufacture enabled a shift from agrarian to industrial economy, through which the

principles and practices of capitalism were implemented. Often hailed as ‘labour saving,’

mechanical production in fact required a constant supply of operators, a reliable workforce

1 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. by Frederick Etchells, London: Architectural Press, 1946, pp. 256-7.

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that would ensure profitability. The greatest change to European cities came from the

introduction of factories, and from the dramatic increases in population as peasants moved

to urban centres to seek employment. Moving to cities, rural populations were

disconnected from their engagement with the land, and from the cycles of growth and return

of agrarian life. The combination of industrial pollution and human waste proved too much

for the cities to absorb, leading to epidemics of cholera and typhoid that claimed many

thousands of lives. These epidemics were the major impediment to the optimism brought

about by the belief in progress and improvement to material wealth.

Most cities had been founded on waterways that provided both a regular supply of fresh

water as well as a conduit for waste. When these proved inadequate to cope with the

demands of industrialisation, their augmentation with reticulated supply and drainage was

slow to occur. The need for infrastructure was not immediately apparent, as its role in the

prevention of disease was little understood. Efforts made to remove waste were motivated

largely by the desire to avoid the foul smells associated with it. The widespread introduction

of water supply and drainage occurred only after developments in medical science that

identified the cause of disease and its means of transmission. The discovery of germs led to

a new conception of the body, one that required new practices of bathing, dress, and

hygiene. These practices were not automatically adopted, but needed to be disseminated

throughout the population. This was done using various forms of instruction and

encouragement, and involved the gradual introduction of services into the home. For

architects, dealing with new spaces for ablution meant complicity in the dissemination of

these practices, and with them, the promotion of a new kind of body. The idea of a hygienic

body, a body clean and free of corruption, was to become a dominant metaphor for modern

architecture.

Disease, Air, and Water

As cities grew rapidly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of

industrialisation, strategies of removing pollution and waste were slow to be adopted. In

many cities, improvements were made to infrastructure only in response to outbreaks of fire

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or disease.2 The result, according to Lewis Mumford, was “[…] the most degraded urban

environment the world had yet seen.”3 Cities required new practices of hygiene, which in

turn depended upon adequate water supply and drainage. Yet for infrastructure to be used,

a transformation in attitudes to health and hygiene was required. The rural populations who

moved to cities had brought with them attitudes that saw dirt as a source of life and

protection from disease. Constant contact with the earth had been a natural way of life; all

things grew from the earth, and all things returned to it. Crops were watered by rain, but

rarely was it collected and used for bathing. Washing was considered unnecessary, since

dirt and excrement were thought to provide a ‘cordon sanitaire’, which bathing would

remove.4 Although the move to cities meant leaving crops behind, the peasants brought

whatever means of subsistence they could, such as livestock, poultry and beasts of burden.

Streets became filled with the waste of animals and humans alike, with the carcasses of dead

animals adding to the refuse. The level of waste soon became intolerable.5 The smell, as

well as being unpleasant, was considered a cause of disease. Since the Middle Ages, ill

health had been associated with odours, with disease, especially plague, thought to be

contracted by the absorption of mephitic air through the lungs or skin. While skin could be

protected by dirt or impermeable clothing, the danger of breathing foul air could only be

avoided if the air itself was removed. The danger of mephitis was also avoided by replacing

it with other odours; incense, smoke, and perfumes were originally used for this purpose.6

Aromatics could also be used to strengthen and protect the body. Indeed belief in the

therapeutic nature of aromatics extended back to Hippocrates and Galen.7 Avoiding

disease was largely a matter of deodorisation, and smell was crucial in evaluating the

healthiness or otherwise of air. On the level of the body, the simplest strategy of

2 Mark Girouard, Cities & People: a Social and Architectural History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, p. 339. 3 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 (1961), p. 509. 4 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, pp. 261-263; see also Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 216. 5 Terence McLaughlin, Coprophilia: or, a peck of dirt, London: Cassell, 1971. Eighteenth-century Britain, writes McLaughlin, was “drowning in its own excrement.” p. 3. 6 Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, London and New York: Routledge. 1994; Annick Le Guérer, Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell, translated by Richard Miller, New York: Turtle Bay Books. 1993. 7 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination, translated by Miriam Kochan, Roy Porter, and Christopher Prendergast; London: MacMillan, 1996 (1986), p. 62.

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deodorisation was to repel or replace foul air using fragrances. Perfume was the most direct

of a variety of means of fumigating bodies and spaces, using such aromatics as herbs, resins,

vinegar, camphor, and even gunpowder.8 Ideas of health and illness were often understood

within a theological framework. Foul air, disease, and death were the hallmarks of evil,

while pleasant smells were a sign of goodness: saints were reported as emanating only

pleasant smells, known as the ‘odour of sanctity.’9 The attraction and repulsion of smells

provided a ready measure for distinguishing between good and bad, of food, water, air, or

other people. As Alain Corbin explains, smell is the basic sense of sympathy and antipathy

among beings.10

Attitudes to air were influenced by William Harvey’s publication describing the

circulation of the blood (De Motu Cordis) following his return to London.11 The health of

the body was no longer conceived in terms of a balance of humours, but was now

dependent upon maintaining the flow of blood. Ernst Platner applied the principle to air: like

blood, air needed to circulate, and skin was the membrane through which air in the body

was exchanged with the atmosphere. Dirt on the skin, instead of protecting the body, was

seen to impede this exchange.12 To enable the skin to breathe, Platner recommended

frequent ablutions, for the face, hands, and feet, and even, on occasion, for the whole body.

Prior to this, bathing had largely been symbolic or therapeutic. In fact, since the Middle

Ages, the dangers associated with exposing the body to water were seen to be so

potentially harmful that bathing was largely avoided.13 Because the skin was regarded as

permeable, the delicate balance of humours could easily be upset by exposing the body to

water, making it particularly susceptible to disease. Water could not only hold mephitis, but

could also relax the fibres, and weaken the organism. Further, moralists warned against the

dangers associated with bathing; the prospect of pleasure associated with the exposure of

8 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, pp. 61-66. 9 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 39. See also Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerson Buchanan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. 10 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 140. 11 William Harvey, An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, 1628. 12 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 71; Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 262. 13 George Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, translated by Jean Birrell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 9.

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the naked body, and the threat of succumbing to autoeroticism.14 Apart from these

dangers, there was also the practical problem of access to water. Only for the wealthy was

the prospect of a regular supply of clean water a reality, with servants to perform the labour

of carrying it indoors. For the masses, bathing was collective, if it happened at all; mostly

the sweat of labour was enough to clean the pores.

For the bourgeoisie, prior to the adoption of bathing, cleaning the body was achieved

using a ‘dry wash,’ wiping dirt and perspiration from the body with a linen cloth.15 The

cloth could also be perfumed, allowing the scent to be transferred to the body by rubbing.

The expense of the cloth and the labour of cleaning it meant that these practices were limited

to the upper classes. Later, linen was interspersed between the body and its heavier outer

clothing. This lining of linen could be removed and cleaned. Since it was white, such linen

was highly visible, and soon came to represent the cleanliness of the body.16 As fear over

the dangers of miasma eased, the outer layers became less constrictive, and the linen

beneath became even more visible. Thus Harvey’s ideas had led to a new visual language

of cleanliness, which also served as a form of class distinction.17 The removal of dirt

enabled the free circulation of air around the skin. Less constrictive clothing further

encouraged circulation, at the same time making skin visible, revealing its healthiness through

contact with the air. Clean skin symbolised the fact that inner impurities had been allowed to

escape, vented through the skin to the atmosphere. Cleanliness was reduced to a purely

mechanical system of purging the body of impurities collected from the surrounding air. As a

result ideas of pollution were redefined. The meaning of ‘purity’ shifted, from a religious

conception of inner goodness to a secular one related to people’s social experience. As

Sennett observes, “Impurity meant dirty skin rather than a stain on the soul.”18

14 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 72. 15 Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness. 16 Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, p. 41. 17 “Cleanliness was the visual effect that marked one’s membership of a social class rather than the state of one’s body.” Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, p. 5. 18 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 262.

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Surfaces and Cities

Strategies of cleaning cities were based upon the same principles as those used for the

body. Atmospheric strategies relied upon the replacement of mephitic air using aromatics.

Attempts at dispersal were also made using noise, such as the ringing of bells or firing

cannons. These soon gave way to strategies that sought to improve circulation of air,

leading to a transformation of surface.19 Paving, used since Roman times, was seen as an

effective way to encourage the flow of air. Paving also had a pleasing appearance, made

traffic easier, and most importantly, sealed off the air from the dangerous exhalations of the

earth.20 Cobblestones, between which could accumulate the filth of the city, were replaced

with flagstones, having a smooth surface and precise joints. The provision of water began as

a means of cleansing the air, and the nineteenth century saw an increase in the use of water

fountains for the purification of public spaces.21 Paving could easily be cleared of rubbish

using water, the use of which was intended merely to encourage flow. What mattered was

keeping things moving, the movement itself seen as sufficient prevention against corruption.22

The therapeutic effects of movement led to a desire to clear the streets of waste. Drainage

began as a means to ensure the movement of water, thus preventing stagnation; sewage

systems began to be installed.23 Municipal health laws were introduced requiring that streets

be swept and rubbish removed.24 Industry and commerce were also affected, as factories

and markets were threatened with relocation, as were other sources of smells such as

slaughter-houses and cemeteries. This separation was not originally mandated by town

planning regulations, but lower rents in areas surrounding these facilities often led landlords

to press for their removal. So began the modern planning strategies of separation and

isolation, originating from sensory intolerance, attempting to maximise ventilation and

minimise the odious intermingling of smells.

19 Rodolphe el-Khoury, “Polish and Deodorise: Paving the City in Late-Eighteenth-Century France,” Assemblage 31, 1997: pp. 6-15. 20 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 90. 21 Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 27. 22 “Cleaning did not mean washing so much as draining; the primary goal was to ensure the discharge, the evacuation of rubbish.” Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 91. 23 Most European cities were equipped with drainage systems around the mid-nineteenth century. Girouard, Cities & People, p. 340. 24 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 263.

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Building on the bodily metaphors used by Renaissance architects, planners sought to

apply Harvey’s ideas to the layout of cities. The major streets of most European cities had

originally been intended for ceremonial purposes, allowing the movement of citizens toward

shrines, monuments, or palaces. For Enlightenment planners, the principle of health based

on circulation made movement an end in itself. Those who travelled to the New World,

such as Pierre L’Enfant, planner of Washington in the late eighteenth century, had the

opportunity to put these ideas into practice in the design of cities laid out from scratch.25

But for those working European capitals, the facilitation of movement involved the

destruction of large areas of the city. This is particularly evident in Baron Haussmann’s

reconstruction of Paris in the 1850’s and 1860’s. Working from a sketch given to him by

Emperor Napoleon III, Haussmann opened out over 150 kilometres of new streets,

enabling the introduction of water supply, sewers, gas lighting, and public transport, along

with schools, hospitals, barracks, and public parks.26 The new streets were made by

demolishing large numbers of buildings in which labouring classed worked and lived, leaving

communities split in two by boulevards flowing with traffic.27 This was enabled by a

combination of new forms of legislation, involving the introduction of compulsory purchase

orders as well as laws relating to public health. 28

The Space of Ablution

Strategies of health based upon principles of circulation were also adopted by architects.

In Ledoux’s design for the Saline de Chaux (1773-1788), the separation of buildings had

the dual benefit of reducing fire hazard and allowing ventilation that would benefit the health

of the workers.29 Ledoux learnt the need for both from his involvement in the debate over

25 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, pp. 263-270. 26 Leonardo Benevolo, The History of the City, translated by Geoffrey Culverwell, London: Scolar Press, 1980, pp. 787-822. 27 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, pp. 329-332. 28 Benevolo, The History of the City, p. 787-822. 29 Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the end of the Ancien Regime, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 94-95.

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the rebuilding of the Hotel-Dieu in Paris, destroyed by fire in 1772.30 Although Ledoux did

not design any hospitals, he was familiar with the guidelines for their layout written by the

physician Antoine Petit 1774, which suggested isolating ward blocks using a radial plan

form.31 In hospitals, smooth surfaces were introduced to encourage the flow of air, with

ceramic tiles plastering, and whitewashing used to render the walls impermeable.32

Chemical disinfectants were also used, with lime dissolved in water proving effective in

neutralising the odour of corpses.33 The strategies of separation identified by Foucault as

facilitating surveillance in hospitals and prisons were often promoted as a means to improve

the health of inmates.34 With their densely packed collections of docile bodies, such

institutions proved ideal laboratories for reformers to test their methods.35 The introduction

of a centralised system for heating and ventilation in Joshua Jebb’s design for the Pentonville

Prison (1844) enabled prisoners to be kept healthy while interred in windowless cells.36

The desire for ventilation led to a renegotiation of the space of the individual body, through

the separation of patients and prisoners either into discrete cells or individual beds.37

Crowding became a source of anxiety, with the spatial requirements of the body determined

by forms of sensory intolerance.38 The increasing spatial definition of the individual also

occurred on a domestic level. The introduction of water into the home resulted in the

articulation of private space into areas for sleeping, dressing, and bathing. According to

Corbin, this reconfiguration of private spaces led to a new narcissism, an encounter with the

self and its individual emanations, free from the intrusion of others.39 This desire to prevent

the commingling of odours would lead to the spatial distribution of the modern home, with

30 Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment, Princeton, N.J: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. 31 Vidler, Ledoux, p. 95; Vidler, The Writing of the Walls, p. 55-64. Guidelines for hospital design were also prepared by the physician Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, brother of architect Julien-David. 32 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 91. 33 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 122. 34 See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish , and Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. 35 On the role of architecture in prison reform, see Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue. 36 Luis Fernandez-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy, translated by Gina Cariño, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 233-238. 37 Vidler, The Writing of the Walls, p. 77. 38 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, pp. 98-100. 39 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, pp. 95-101.

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common spaces for cooking and socialising, separated from those intended for the care of

the body.40

Figure 14: Ledoux, Perspective View of the Town of Chaux. Engraving by Berthault, from Ramée (ed.),

Ledoux, Paris, Lenoir, 1847, pl. 116. (As published in Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, p. 264.)

40 See also Monique Eleb-Vidal avec Anne Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de la Vie Privée: Maisons et Mentalités, XVIIe - XIXe siècles, Bruxelles: Archives d’Architecture Moderne, 1989.

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Figure 15: Antoine Petit, Project for a new Hôtel-Dieu, plan, 1774. Engraving by Claude-Mathieu de

Lagardette from Antoine Petit, Mémoire sur la meilleure manière de la construire un hôpital de

lalades (Paris 1774), pl. 1. (As published in Vidler, The Writing of the Walls, pl. 51.)

Figure 16: Antoine Petit, Project for a new Hôtel-Dieu, section. (As published in Vidler, The Writing of

the Walls, pl. 52.)

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Figure 17: Jean-Baptiste Le Roy and Charles-François Viel, ward block for a new Hôtel-Dieu, 1773.

In Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences, 1787. (As published in Vidler, The Writing of the Walls, pl.

55.)

Figure 18: Pentonville Prison. Joshua Jebb, Report of the Surveyor General of Prisons, 1844. (As

published in Fernandez-Galiano, Fire and Memory, p. 235.)

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Unfortunately, the refinements arising from the introduction of services were slow to

reach the homes of the working classes. High population densities in tenement housing

meant that articulations of space were simply not possible. Moreover, most landlords were

reluctant to bear the expense of installing plumbing and drainage in new constructions, let

alone fitting them to existing dwellings.41 Despite this, attempts were made to disseminate

hygiene practices among the poor. From the safety of institutions, sanitary reformers moved

out to the houses of peasants and workers to encourage the use of water for bathing. Yet

the motives of reformers can be regarded as not entirely philanthropic. With little access to

the new hygiene practices, the poor were readily identifiable by their lack of conformity to

the codes of white clothing and clean skin. The subtle refinements of personal odour and

space among the bourgeoisie led them to regard the poor as responsible for the smell of the

city. Along with the threat to olfactory sensibility, the association of foul air with contagion

meant that the poor were regarded as a threat to health. And worst of all, the smell of the

poor was regarded as indicative of their moral corruption that threatened the order of the

city.42 The bourgeoisie, feeling crowded in upon by the urban poor, sought to extend their

own practices of hygiene across the entire population, in order to rid themselves of this

threefold threat.43 Among the poor, however, there was suspicion of, and resistance to,

sanitary reform.44

In the newly formed United States of America, the promotion of cleanliness as a public

virtue was even more pronounced. Major public figures, most notably Benjamin Franklin,

urged the population to clean themselves by appealing to their sense of patriotism.

Cleanliness was raised to the level of a moral standard, one of the ‘values’ enumerated by

41 Mumford, The City in History, pp. 526-530. 42 “[…] from clean streets to clean houses, and from clean rooms to clean bodies, the intention was no less than to transform the habits of the most deprived sector of the population, to banish their supposed vices, concealed or visible, by changing their bodily habits.” Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, p. 192. 43 “Emphasizing the fetidity of the laboring classes, and thus the danger of infection from their mere presence, helped the bourgeois to sustain his self-indulgent, self-induced terror, which dammed up the expression of remorse. From these considerations emerged the tactics of public health policy, which symbolically assimilated disinfection and submission. ‘The enormous fetidity of social catastrophes,’ whether riots or epidemics, gave rise to the notion that making the proletariat odorless would promote discipline and work among them.” Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 143. 44 “Bourgeois deodorization presupposed wealth, or at least comfort; it attested lack of involvement in manual labour. [...] The extensive use of chlorine in water multiplied rumours; some people saw it as evidence that the elite were bent on mass homicide.” Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 213.

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Franklin and others, used to identify the true American character.45 This practice continued

well into the twentieth century.46 As Suellen Hoy explains, the pursuit of cleanliness became

something of an American obsession.47 Hygiene became a public matter, with associations

forming to combat the outbreak of disease in public spaces. ‘Sanitarians,’ self appointed

agents acting the public interest, sought to impose control on those citizens considered too

undisciplined and complacent to improve their environment.48 Yet without scientific

knowledge of the cause of disease, many of the recommendations made by reformers were

phrased in domestic or aesthetic terms.49 The desire to rid the population of disease and

disorder also extended to the erasure of imported cultural practices. Cultural difference was

erased as middle class standards of hygiene were inculcated in African American and

immigrant minorities.50 Traces of culture were further threatened as reformers made their

point in aesthetic terms, expressing a preference for sparse, robust, and easily cleaned

furnishings, as opposed to the more ornate styles preferred among immigrants. From body,

to dress, to ornamentation, to architecture, the promotion of virtue through the physical

environment appears as a common theme throughout the nineteenth century. Values of

health and hygiene were often explicitly connected with the morality of family, with the home

as the focal point for the interdependence of the family unit. Not only were families reliant

upon their breadwinner for sustenance and standing, so too the breadwinner was reliant

upon the stability of the home to avoid drifting from the path of constancy.51

45 Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 46 The idea of listing ‘values,’ enabling identity through difference, appeared in the sociological research of Milton Rokeach. Among such middle class aspirations as ‘comfort’ and ‘freedom,’ Rokeach includes ‘cleanliness’. See Milton Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values, New York: Free Press, 1973. For a critique of the biases inherent in Rokeach’s work, see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. 47 Hoy, Chasing Dirt, passim. 48 Reformers such as Lemuel Shattuck of Boston “recommended a programme of sanitary control in which the state and municipality would share the responsibilities of guardian, regulator, and educator of its citizens.” Hoy, Chasing Dirt, p. 26. 49 Most associations for promoting hygiene were comprised of amateurs, who were only vaguely aware of emerging medical and scientific theories. Hoy, Chasing Dirt, p. 75. 50 “[C]leanliness became something more than a way to prevent epidemics and make cities liveable—it became a route to citizenship, to becoming American.” Hoy, Chasing Dirt, p. 87. 51 Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 229.

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Robin Evans describes a similar impetus to moral reform in English public housing of the

Victorian period.52 Evans argues that twentieth century housing emerged from the efforts to

overcome the ‘indecencies’ of the rookery den.53 Although the moral intentions of

improved living conditions has been largely overshadowed by the effectiveness of sanitary

reform, the provision of housing is predicated upon the view that the two are inseparable.54

In the crowded rookeries, informal spatial divisions had prevented the easy identification of

families and individuals. Although this hampered the efforts of agents of the state, especially

police and tax collectors, a localised morality was ensured by the constant presence of

others.55 At nighttime, however, sleep led to both reduced vigilance and increased

temptation, with abandonment to sleep acknowledged at the time as an erotic condition.

The intermingling of families in shared sleeping spaces, often in a reduced state of dress,

aroused fear among reformers.56 Model housing, in contrast, sought to separate families

from each other, with individual apartments accessed by a common, external stair,

preventing dwellings being used as through-routes, while also forming a barrier between

each dwelling and the public realm. Inside each apartment was further divided, having

separate bedrooms for parents, boys, and girls, along with a privy and scullery. The internal

divisions promoted a particular form of family structure, demarcating forms of behaviour and

their associated levels of privacy. Like the new practices of hygiene, these new housing

types met with resistance, their inhabitants suspicious of the ‘introverted domesticity’

entailed by their occupation.57

52 Robin Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space,” Architectural Association Quarterly, 10/1, 1978, pp. 24-35. 53 Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings,” p. 24. 54 “Behind novel claims that [...] improvements to popular housing were instrumental to social progress, lay a conviction that virtue could be wrought from architecture as surely as corruption was wrought from slums.” Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings,” p. 26. 55 “You could never be certain where anyone was [...] but you could be sure that whatever anyone did was done in the purview of numerous neighbors.” Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings,” p. 28. 56 “Investigators could reveal grotesque instances of overcrowding but were as much concerned with the moral implications of flesh pressed against flesh as with the more obvious discomforts of piling too many bodies into a confined space.” Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings,” pp. 30-31. 57 Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings,” p. 31.

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Counting Bodies, Cleaning Bodies

Efforts to control populations through sanitary and housing reform were further enhanced

by the then emergent ‘science’ of statistics. At the end of the Napoleonic era, new practices

of counting populations developed as church records of births, deaths, and marriages were

extended to measure various aspects of human behaviour. In the interests of the state,

bodies were measured, the incidence of disease was counted, and aberrations such as crime

and suicide were recorded. According to Ian Hacking, a fascination for quantification

emerged, resulting in an “avalanche of printed numbers”.58 Statistics helped keep track of

populations, and in one case in particular, proved helpful in identifying the cause of disease.

By mapping deaths due to an outbreak of cholera in the Broad Street area of London in

1854, John Snow confirmed his suspicion that a local pump-well was contaminated. The

handle was removed from the pump, and the epidemic soon ended.59 Yet while the science

of statistics was helpful in establishing the cause of disease and the efficacy of cures, it also

led to a reconfiguration of the idea of normality. The French pathologist François-Joseph-

Victor Broussais argued that the pathological state of any organ was a result of irritation that

altered it from its ‘normal’ state, with disease and health differing in degree, not in kind.60

Normality, far from being defined as an expected or usual state, emerged as the opposite of

the pathological, a state prior to, or free from, deviation. Yet because statistics enabled the

normal to be quantified, namely as that which occurred within acceptable boundaries of the

curve of Normal distribution, the primacy was soon inverted. Now the pathological was

defined as a deviation from the normal, and all variation was characterised as variation from

the normal state. When August Comte applied Broussais’ theories to the ‘collective

organism,’ normality was used in relation to intellectual and moral dimensions of society.61

Through Comte’s positivism, the idea of normality ceased to be regarded as the ordinary

state, and instead became an ideal state toward which effort and progress were to be

58 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 164. 59 John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, London, 1855. See also Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1997, pp. 27-37. 60 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. 164. 61 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 313-314.

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directed.62 The states of normality that were to be sought were intricately related to the

categories into which people were classified before they could be counted. This practice,

which Hacking describes as ‘making up people,’ serves to establish identity in accordance

with socially accepted norms, while erasing difference by eliminating all other aspects form

consideration.63 Although Comte’s positivism veered away from these numerical notions,

the ethics of utilitarianism—the greatest good for the greatest number—were intimately

connected with these measured ideals; numbers became a moral indication of the quality of

life.

But it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the control of populations was

to enjoy the full force of scientific objectivity. While the medical community had been

supportive of the practices of bathing and ventilation, it was with the discoveries of Louis

Pasteur in the 1880’s that the need for public hygiene became widely acknowledged.

Simultaneous discoveries by Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany had identified

micro-organisms as the cause of disease. This originally found agricultural application, but

after Pasteur twice succeeded in saving the life of a young boy threatened by rabies, interest

in his work gripped the public imagination. In the following years, Pasteur, Koch, and their

successors identified the cause of large numbers of deadly diseases, and developed vaccines

for their prevention. Yet Pasteur’s discoveries were to influence more than just preventative

medicine. Around the same time, surgical procedures were beginning to adopt, albeit

tentatively, an interest in cleanliness as promoted by reformers. In 1847, for example, Ignaz

Semmelweis, a physician at the Vienna General Hospital, ordered medical students, who

had been assisting with deliveries after coming straight from autopsies, to wash their hands

with chlorinated water. The result was a sharp decline in mortality rates.64 But it was not

until the work of Joseph Lister that ideas of antiseptic surgery would take hold. Lister,

aware of Pasteur’s research, realised that airborne bacteria were entering the body during

surgery, causing infection. Exposed flesh, he realised, needed to be cleaned, replacing the

barrier of skin with a chemical barrier.65 Lister’s formalisation of antiseptic surgery

62 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. 168. 63 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. 3. See also Hacking’s “Making Up People,” in T. Heller et al (eds.), Reconstructing Individualism, Stanford, 1986, pp. 222-236. 64 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 369-370. 65 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 371.

Evident Virtues 102

techniques combined with another dramatic medical advance, also made possible through

chemical researches. The 1840’s saw the first steps in the use of anaesthetics, with nitrous

oxide, ether, and chloroform enabling the surgeon to carry out his task without inflicting pain.

Previously, surgery had been limited to surface manipulations, or to emergency procedures

occasioned by war or infection. The combination of anaesthetics and antiseptics enabled

surgeons to venture inside the body, inspecting and manipulating the body interior while the

patient was still alive.66 This meant that pathologists were able to do more than identify

disease during autopsy. Foucault’s criticism of the patho-anatomical gaze rested on the

epistemic priority given to the corpse, the revelation of truth provided by the death of the

patient.67 Such an event, while lamentable, placed the physician in the advantageous

position of being able to confirm his diagnosis. Yet as Porter explains, pathology did not

lead to cures or help improve matters for the sick. Invasive surgical procedures, however,

enabled the advances of pathology to be put to use. In this way, a strange inversion was

effected. While the living body could be opened to the gaze and touch of the surgeon, this

was only possible by temporarily reducing the patient’s body to the level of a corpse.

These transformations brought a dramatic increase in the social status of the surgeon,

now exceeding that of the physician. The gradual inclusion of surgery in the curricula of

medical schools had brought status, particularly through association with anatomy.

Anatomical knowledge, derived by gazing into the body of another, had acquired a degree

of objectivity. This, combined with the patient’s inability to see into their own interior, gives

the surgeon the power of agency, acting on behalf of the patient to venture into their body

interior. To do so required trust, earned carefully by the medical profession through years of

social and institutional affiliation, not to mention the continued publication of anatomical

knowledge in scientific terms.68 The surgeon became a mediator between interior and

exterior worlds.69 The success of medicine in the fight against disease and the treatment of

66 Surgery was also complemented by the various diagnostic techniques that had been developed; from stethoscopes (which saved the physician from the smell of the patient) to X-rays. See Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. 67 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 166. 68 Ludmilla Jordanova, “Medicine and Genres of Display,” in Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds., Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. 69 “The surgeon seems to share the iconic status of the artist (or the visionary) within our culture, since both are held to be in possession of a privileged gaze which is able to pass beyond common experience,

Evident Virtues 103

illness and injury made doctors a powerful voice in the community. Medicine transformed

science from an abstracted inquiry into a benevolent presence in everyday life. The hygiene

movement found the medical profession to be a powerful ally, giving to bathing an objective

necessity.70 Institutions, especially hospitals and schools, were utilised to instruct the

population in these new rituals. Journals such as L’Illustration and Le Petit Journal

encouraged models of bourgeois behaviour, the adoption of which led almost inevitably to

increased consumption. Hygiene was good for people, and good for business. Fortunately,

the cost of installing water supply and sewerage systems was usually borne by the state, in

the interests of all. But in exchange, bodies became arrogated by the state. While water

permeated every part of the body exterior, the body interior was subjected to control

through vaccination. In the interests of health, privacy was overruled, and the relation

between doctor and patient transformed. As Latour observes, the physician shifted from

being a confidant of the patient to an agent of public health intent upon the eradication of

disease.71

Rather than reconfiguring practices of hygiene, germ theory tended instead to intensify

those already in place. The enemy, although invisible, had at last been identified. Avoidance

of infection, it was now realised, required thorough cleansing using water. Germs could not

be seen, but clean clothes and skin could be: and smell was no longer a reliable indication of

salubrity. Thus germ theory engendered a shift from an atmospheric to a hydraulic

conception of hygiene, expressed largely through visual codes of cleanliness. The potential

dangers of water were far less serious than the threat posed by contagious diseases, and

resistance to its use needed to be overcome. This required not only changes to the social

acceptance of bathing, but also what is perhaps the most significant technological

development in the modern city: the transformation of water from a gift bestowed by nature

to an industrial product. It is this transformation that Jean-Pierre Goubert has described as

through surface structures, to encounter a reserved core of reality.” Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 12. 70 “Proud of its knowledge and utterly convinced of the certainty of its arguments, the scientific elite busied itself with making a distinction between the healthy and the unhealthy and disseminating its message of hygiene and cleanliness. […] The scientific world thus overthrew ‘the world order’, changed the use of space and of the body and created new objects and new rituals.” Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 215.

Evident Virtues 104

the ‘conquest of water.’72 For bourgeois practices of bodily hygiene to become

widespread, dramatic advances in water supply and drainage were required. In an age

already dominated by scientific attitudes to the world, this meant handing over the control of

water to scientists; chemists, physicians, hydrologists, geologists, and engineers. The

vicissitudes of nature could no longer be relied upon to provide water in sufficient quantity,

and with sufficient regularity, to ensure adequate cleaning of the body and its clothing. Only

by industrialising the supply of water could hygiene be guaranteed. These developments

helped to eradicate the epidemics that had tormented European cities since the middle ages;

indeed it is in the fight against disease that modern science most directly achieves Bacon’s

desire to overcome nature in the service of humanity. And in doing so, the city was

transformed.73 Water’s former sacred status, its long association with rituals of purity, was

overwritten by the processes of cleanliness recommended by the physicians and sanitary

reformers.74 No longer was it sufficient to merely anoint the body with water, purifying the

soul contained therein: instead, purification required scrupulous cleansing of the entire body.

The ‘conquest’ was thus twofold, as the domestication of water served in turn to transform

the rituals of daily life, bringing a new awareness of the body.75 The adoption of Pasteur’s

ideas had entailed a shift in strategies of cleanliness; along with the impetus to movement

inspired by Harvey, bodies now had to be thoroughly washed.

71 “In order to save everyone’s liberty, the contagious patient must be notified by the physician, isolated, disinfected, in short, put out of harm’s way, like a criminal. Disease was no longer a private misfortune but an offence to public order.” Latour, The Pasteurization of France, p. 123. 72 Goubert, The Conquest of Water. 73 Goubert writes: “Those whose role it was to manage and manipulate space—architects, town planners, sanitary engineers, hygienists, chemists and engineers—created new objects and sculpted new structures, concealed the hydraulic systems and took water underground in order to protect it and to protect man from it; then, when it had performed—or failed to perform—its cleansing function they sent it back to the river or made it gush forth from fountains and taps or even the new British-style lavatories. In their role as conquerors, they planned, organised and built a new ‘body’, that of water, which they incorporated into nature in the image of man.” Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 253. 74 As Goubert observes, water came to “symbolise the hygiene that was sacrosanct to the followers of Pasteur.” Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 27. 75 “The mechanism of conquest was based on water’s ancient purity, and on innumerable purification rites—both pagan and Christian—and was solidly supported by a social code reflected in the attention given to cleanliness and tapped by the hygienist movement; water slowly conquered the world by permeating society and insinuating itself into innermost recesses of the body that had hitherto remained concealed.” Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 27. Goubert here makes reference to Phillipe Perrot, Le Travail des Apparences: Ou les transformations du corps féminin XVIIIè--XIXè siècles, Paris, 1984.

Evident Virtues 105

Figure 19: Illustration from Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City

Planning , p. 125. Skeleton, musculature, and viscera provide inspiration for the free plan.

Evident Virtues 106

Figure 20: Illustration from Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City

Planning, p. 166. Airconditioning shown in comparison to the function of the lung.

Embracing Technology

When Le Corbusier described the house as “a machine for living in,” he coined what has

become one of the most dominant metaphors of modern architecture. It is an image which

captures the growing influence of scientific and technological progress that swept the world

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For all the changes—social, political,

aesthetic, and epistemological—brought about since the beginning of the modern era, the

machine serves as a metonymic reminder for all the others. Viewed as a machine, the house

becomes subjected to scientific ideology, the belief in endless progress provided by rational

thought. Most significant for modernism was the idea of functionality; that like a machine, a

house, or indeed any building, can and should be designed according to the purpose for

which it will be used.

Evident Virtues 107

Le Corbusier was familiar with Renaissance theories, derived from Vitruvius, connecting

architecture to the body. To arrive, then, at the conception of ‘house as machine’

transforms these theories by an idea that we have seen originates in Descartes: namely that

the human body is a machine. This idea was most fully developed by Julien Offray La

Mettrie in his L’Homme Machine of 1748.76 Thus Corbusier combined these ideas to

make the home a major site for the promotion of technological values. It is interesting to

note, then, the ‘functions’ that Le Corbusier had in mind for the machine-house. He wrote:

“A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will,

conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion.”77

Sandwiched between the famous quotation and the call to good taste of a classical

aesthete, we find no less than seven factors related to the cleanliness, health, and comfort of

the occupants. Le Corbusier’s machine-house, like so much domestic technology of the

time, was an instrument of cleanliness, manifesting the advances of science on the level of the

body. Throughout Vers Une Architecture, Le Corbusier promotes the importance of

everything that is clean and healthy: “We have acquired a taste for fresh air and clear

daylight.”78 He urges that the house be considered with the same intellectual, aesthetic,

moral, and therapeutic criteria that were used by reformers to promote hygiene.

Technology, applied to domestic construction and habitation, becomes a metonym for all the

benefits that it will bring. He writes:

“Eradicate from your mind any hard and fast conceptions in regard to the dwelling-house and look at the question from an objective and critical angle, and you will inevitably arrive at the ‘House-Tool,’ the mass-production house, available for everyone, incomparably healthier than the old kind (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same sense that the working tools, familiar to us in our present existence, are beautiful.”79

76 Julien Offray de la Mettrie, L’Homme Machine, Leyden, 1748; translated by G. C. Bussey and M. W. Calkins as Man a Machine, Chicago, 1912. See also A. Vartanian, La Mettrie’s ‘L’Homme Machine,’ Princeton 1960; and Steadman, The Evolution of Designs. On the body as a machine, see also Johnson, The Body in the Mind, pp. 127-137. 77 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 89. 78 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 85. 79 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 245.

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The appeal of industrial aesthetics to modern architects was later captured by Reyner

Banham in his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age.80 Le Corbusier’s interest in

mechanisation is made apparent in the illustrations of aeroplanes and motor vehicles

appearing throughout Vers Une Architecture. Yet in his condemnation of the then

prevalent housing conditions, their lack of technological advance is seen as a threat to health:

“Bewilderment seizes us, then, if we bring our eyes to bear on the old and rotten buildings that form our snail-shell, our habitation, which crush us in our daily contact with them—putrid and useless and unproductive. Everywhere can be seen machines which serve to produce something and produce it admirably, in a clean sort of way. The machine that we live in is an old coach full of tuberculosis. There is no real link between our daily activities at the factory, the office or the bank, which are healthy and useful and productive, and our activities in the bosom of the family which are handicapped at every turn.”81

Productivity, progress, and hygiene are interconnected, the combined benefits of

modernisation. Le Corbusier appears himself as a sanitary reformer, and in the “Manual of

the Dwelling” in Vers Une Architecture, he adopts the form and tone of the hygiene

manuals of the day:

“Demand a bathroom looking south, one of the largest rooms in the house or flat, the old drawing-room for instance. One wall to be entirely glazed, opening if possible on to a balcony for sun baths; the most up-to-date fittings with a shower-bath and gymnastic appliances. “An adjoining room to be a dressing-room in which you can dress and undress. Never undress in your bedroom. It is not a clean thing to do and makes the room horribly untidy. […] Demand bare walls in your bedroom, your living room and your dining-room. […] If you can, put the kitchen at the top of the house to avoid smells. […] Demand a vacuum cleaner. […] Teach your children that a house is only habitable when it is full of light and air, and when the floors and walls are clear. To keep your floors in order, eliminate heavy furniture and thick carpets.”82

80 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: The Architectural Press, 1960. 81 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, pp. 256-7. 82 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, pp. 114-115.

Evident Virtues 109

Figure 21: Le Corbusier, Villa

Savoye (Photo: Ralph

Liebermann).

Principles of hygiene are put into

practice, as pilotis raise the

building off the ground, and

living areas open out to the sunlit

roof terrace.

Figure 22: Le Corbusier, Villa

Savoye, ground floor. . (Photo:

Ralph Liebermann).

A hand basin allows guests to wash

before ascending to the floors

above.

Evident Virtues 110

Le Corbusier’s urban strategies also build upon those already utilised by Enlightenment

planners to clean up the city. Buildings separated and raised up above ground allow

maximum ventilation, while also avoiding the contaminations of industry. Through high-rise,

however, the density of the city could be maintained, in order that economic interests be

met:

“It is time that we should repudiate the existing lay-out of our towns, in which the congestion of buildings grows greater, interlaced by narrow streets full of noise, petrol fumes, and dust; and where on each storey the windows open wide on to this foul confusion. The great towns have become too dense for the security of their inhabitants and yet they are not sufficiently dense to meet the new needs of ‘modern business.’”83

One way that Le Corbusier and other modern architects were able to contribute to the

transformation of the city was through the provision of mass housing. Indeed the provision

of housing for the working class occupied much of the attention of early modernist

architects. Attempts to establish acceptable standards, such as the existenzminimum

discussed at the 1928 CIAM conference, invariably led to questions of hygiene.84 The

minimum dwelling naturally included separate rooms for bathing, laundering, and cooking, as

well as adequate access to fresh air and sunlight. Architects thus joined in with the

physicians and sanitary reformers to change the daily lives and habits of the poor, often

relocating them to more ‘appropriate’ dwellings. Sometimes mass housing was able to

directly inculcate industrial values of cleanliness. Companies which provided housing could

extend their surveillance practices right into the homes of workers.85

83 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, pp. 52-55. 84 See Peter Rowe, Modernity and Housing, Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1993, pp. 57-59. 85 Hoy cites the example of the Ford plant in America: “Ford employees became indoctrinated with middle-class standards of hygiene in Americanization classes at company plants. Besides English, they learned how to eat, what to wear, and when to bathe. White-collar company investigators also visited auto workers’ homes, looking for signs of uncleanliness, drunkenness, gambling, or poorly cared-for children.” Hoy, Chasing Dirt, p. 137.

Evident Virtues 111

Transparency

The new high-rise mass housing also enabled architects to overcome the problem of

retro-fitting water supply and drainage into every dwelling. Plumbing became an aesthetic as

well as a technical issue. To achieve the clean lines of the glass curtain wall meant that

hierarchies of privacy needed to be adjusted. New designs enabled wet areas to be pulled

back from the external walls, and plumbing to be hidden in conduits. Yet minimising

fenestration to maintain privacy disrupted the external composition. One solution was to

remove such spaces from the external facade altogether, relying upon mechanical ventilation

and artificial lighting to make the space habitable. In fact, as Paul Clark has argued, only by

denying fenestration to the water closet was Mies van der Rohe able to develop the all glass

facade of the Farnsworth house of 1950, in which the spaces for ablution are the only ones

afforded any visual privacy.86 Of course it is the ownership of the sylvan setting that makes

up for this, but even then, the problems experienced by Mrs Farnsworth are well known.87

For the occupants of the new housing, the matter of privacy was also problematic. While

the acts of bathing were shielded from view, their consequences were made more visible.

Fenestration for living spaces was increased, to maximise the healthy effects of sunlight. Yet

this had the added benefit of opening the house to the external gaze, thus facilitating the self-

appointed task of surveillance adopted by sanitary reformers.

The transparency of glass extends the language of surface developed in response to

theories of contagion. As we have already seen, germ theories led to a proliferation in the

use of water to prevent disease. Smooth surfaces, used to facilitate flow, now had to be

washed as well. Whiteness emerged as a symbol of this cleanliness, in part due to the role

of linen in symbolising bodily hygiene, and in part through the metaphoric relation to skin.

Dirt on the skin was not seen as inherently harmful, but rather as impeding the flow of air

through the skin by which the body rid itself of filth. Whiteness thus symbolised a cleanliness

that went far below the surface, proof that all unwanted matter had been flushed out of the

body. Olfactory codes of cleanliness are thus replaced by visual codes, made possible

86 Paul Clark, “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Scrupulous Building of the Hygenic House,” in Building as a Political Act (Proceedings of the 1997 ACSA International Conference), New York: ACSA Press, 1998. 87 Alice T. Friedman, “Domestic Differences: Edith Farnsworth, Mies van der Rohe, and the Gendered Body,” in Christopher Reed (ed.), Not at home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996, pp. 179-192.

Evident Virtues 112

through deodorisation. Thus hygiene is fundamental to the emergence of vision as the

primary sense of modernity.88 In the tradition of linking architecture and dress dating back

to Alois Riegl, modern architects emulated the white clothing in fashion at the time. But as

Wigley argues, the intention was not to provide one more new style, but to refuse fashion in

favour of function. This antifashion look is intended as the ultimate goal of hygiene, allowing

what Le Corbusier described as “[...] the clear and naked emergence of the Essential” that

is the teleology of culture.89 The white walls of modern architecture provide the archetypal

clean surface, where hygiene is both seen and symbolised, a mark of civilisation.90 The

codes rely not only upon the absence of dirt, but also on the representation of flow: thus the

surfaces are smooth, reflective, and impermeable, free of internal contamination, as smooth

and reflective as the water used to wash them.

88 Mark Wigley has recently described the modernist use of white walls in these terms: “Modern architecture joins the doctor’s white coat, the white tiles of the bathroom, the white walls of the hospital, and so on. Yet the argument is not about hygiene per se. It is about a certain look of cleanliness. Or, more precisely, a cleansing of the look, a hygiene of vision itself. Whitewash purifies the eye rather than the building. Indeed it reveals the central role of vision in hygiene.” Wigley,White Walls, p. 5. 89 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 128. 90 As Wigley writes: “It is supposed to be the look that terminates the obsessive turnover of looks, acting as the stable surface behind the parade of ephemeral fashions, the neutral, or neutralizing, ground with which a building can test itself and other buildings for unwanted fashion infections by making them appear as ornamental ‘stains,’ as Le Corbusier put it, that stand out against its clean surface.” Wigley, Mark, White Walls, p xxii.

Evident Virtues 113

Ornament, despite both its symbolic and

practical embodiment of flow, was rejected

as a mere impediment to the precision of

surface. Yet the clean lines and clean space

of modernity were achieved through a

combination of white walls and glazing.

Glass allows the penetration of vision, yet it

also reinforces the symbolism of flow. The

transparency of glass enables architecture to

align itself with water as a symbol of purity,

enables architecture to turn into water. In

Mies van der Rohe’s Glass Skyscraper

project of 1922, for example, the building

becomes a cataract, washing over all who

would occupy it. Glass makes architecture

into an agent of cleanliness, its transparency

a defining characteristic of modernity,

rendering the space clean, clear, and

odourless.

The idea of transparency in relation to

modern architecture has also been explored by Rowe and Slutzky.91 The literal

transparency of glass, they argue, is but one form of transparency central to modernism.

The other is a ‘phenomenal’ transparency, achieved through the visible interpenetration of

forms. Here the use of overlapping elements in three-dimensional composition alludes to the

parts that cannot be seen. A gestalt of forms combines with the parallax achieved through

movement to open out the form of the building in a continuous flow of forms in space. As

we have seen, this kind of transparency had emerged with perspective, particularly as it was

used to depict the body’s internal organs. The gaze of the medical eye into the compounded

91 Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency, Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997.

Figure 23: Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper,

Berlin, 1922. Photomontage of the second project.

(As published in Mertins, The Presence of Mies, p.

57. Copyright: Berlinische Galerie, Museum für

Moderne Kunst Photographie und Architektur,

Berlin.)

Evident Virtues 114

mass of the body interior was facilitated by the dissector’s hands, disposing the opaque

organs into a visible spatial arrangement. Thus, through transparency both literal and

phenomenal, the interior of the modern dwelling is laid bare to the inquiring gaze of the

agents of health.

The role of water is also evident in the significance placed upon horizontality in

Modernism. As Xavier Costa argues, the placement of buildings on level ground relies upon

an imitation of water’s horizontal surface, achieved using either plumb line or chorobate.92

Water can also enable horizontality to predominate an architectural composition, such as

that of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion of 1929. Despite the pavilion’s meticulous planimetric

asymmetry, it in fact demonstrates a rigorous horizontal symmetry about eye level.93 The

main roof appears to be ‘floating’ overhead, supported by minimal vertical structure, itself

made of highly reflective material. As Josep Quetglas identifies, the pavilion is made entirely

of reflective surfaces, with glass, chrome steel, polished stone, and stucco combining with

water to create endless reflections.94 A solitary human figure, Georg Kolbe’s Sunrise

(1925), stands (on the only inclined surface in the whole pavilion) precariously balanced

above the water of the small pool.

The Medical Body

Beatriz Colomina has also explored some of the ways in which architecture responds to

the influence of medicine.95 The dramatic increase in institutionalised medicine at the

beginning of the twentieth century meant that many architects were engaged to design

facilities for the promotion of health and the treatment of disease. Especially popular were

sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis, the best known being Alvar Aalto’s at Paimio

92 Xavier Costa, ‘Ground Level,’ in Nadir Lahiji, and D. S. Friedman (eds.) Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, pp. 93-102. 93 Robin Evans, “Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 232-276. 94 Josep Quetglas, Fear of Glass: Mies van der Rohe's pavilion in Barcelona, translated by John Stone and Rosa Roig, Basel; Boston: Birkhauser, 2001, pp. 95-101. 95 Beatriz Colomina, “The Medical Body in Modern Architecture,” In Davidson, Cynthia (ed). Anybody, New York; Cambridge, Mass.: Anyone Corp.; MIT Press, 1997, pp. 228-239. She begins: “For as long as we remember, or for as long as history remembers, architecture has followed medicine. If classical

Evident Virtues 115

(1929-33). These facilities influenced the design of domestic architecture, with its ‘constant

preoccupation’ with ventilation, sunlight, hygiene, and white walls.96 Siegfried Giedion’s

1929 book Liberated Dwelling, contained images of mountain lodges, seaside resorts,

sports stadia, gymnastics, sunbathing, and tennis. The images of houses that do appear

show them being used for exercise or for basking in sunshine and fresh air. “It would seem

as if modern architects and their promoters were advocating life in a sanatorium. [...]

Modern architecture was unproblematically understood as a kind of medical equipment, a

mechanism for protecting and enhancing the body.”97 Le Corbusier’s use of pilotis to

protect the house from the wet humid ground is described as an ‘obsession,’ with his

promotion of fresh air and exercise necessitating a new ground in the form of the roof

terrace. And in Tony Garnier’s project for an Industrial City of 1904, the heliotherapy

building of the hospital complex is seen to dominate the city, while the sports centre was

placed in a central site that in mediaeval times would have been reserved for the cathedral.

“Health,” observes Colomina, “became a new form of religion.”98

Belief in the therapeutic value of architecture was encouraged by the problem of

tuberculosis, a disease initially thought to result from a sedentary life in damp, dark, and

poorly ventilated conditions. Environmental causes suggested environmental cures, and

modern architecture sought to provide them. “Nineteenth-century architecture was

demonised as unhealthy, and sun, light, ventilation, exercise, roof terraces, hygiene, and

whiteness were offered as a means to prevent, if not cure, tuberculosis.”99 Unlike other

diseases, tuberculosis was tolerated, romanticised as a state of heightened sensitivity.100

Yet when connected with the metaphor of the body as a machine, the disease suggested

susceptibility to fatigue, thereby threatening industrial and military efficiency.101 Responding

to a body constructed in medical or economic terms thus renders architecture susceptible to

theories of the polis followed theories of the four humors, modern ideas of disease have influenced architectural theories in this century.” p. 230. 96 Colomina, “The Medical Body,” p. 230. 97 Colomina, “The Medical Body,” p. 230. 98 Colomina, “The Medical Body,” p. 231. 99 Colomina, “The Medical Body,” p. 231. 100 Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. 101 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, New York: Basic Books, 1990.

Evident Virtues 116

changing conceptions of the body within medicine. As the body changes with each new

disease, diagnosis, and treatment, so too does its translation into architecture.102

In the work of Charles and Ray Eames, experiments with plywood began with the

design of medical equipment, such as splints and stretchers, for use during World War II.

The furniture that evolved from these suggests a connection between ergonomics and

orthopaedics, with the role of the architect extending beyond the preventative. By designing

the ‘medical equipment’ that is architecture, the architect becomes a surgeon. Colomina

cites an interview with Charles Eames, in which the metaphor was made explicit:

“‘The preoccupation with self-expression is no more appropriate to the world of art than it is to the world of surgery. That does not mean I would reduce self-expression to zero; I am sure that really great surgeons operate on the edge of intuition. But the rigorous constraints in surgery—those are important in any art.’”103

The metaphor of the surgeon becomes the means by which architecture as art is redeemed

from the subjective realm. The body becomes the object of architecture, its therapeutic

needs providing the ‘rigorous constraints’ to which the architect must respond.

The comments of both Le Corbusier and Charles Eames reveal the extent to which

surgery provided the paradigmatic model of the body during the early twentieth century. As

Porter has observed, this was a golden age for medicine, in which the work of Pasteur

symbolised the conquest of nature in the interest of man. The causes of disease had been

identified, and all manner of preventions and cures were rapidly being developed. But more

importantly, germ theory provided the key to putting to use the ‘scientific’ knowledge of

anatomy that had been growing since Vesalius. Through both anaesthetics and antiseptics,

surgeons were able to enter the body, manipulate it, repair it as if it were a machine. This

could be done largely without pain, without risk of infection, without the patient even having

to be aware of their body being operated upon. This extraordinary power over the body is

what enabled the surgeon to eclipse the physician in social status, and to arouse the envy of

the architectural profession. The utopian vision of modernity was realised in the image of the

102 “The body was no longer a stable point of reference around which an architecture could be built. Architects like Le Corbusier and his colleagues actively redesigned the body with their architecture rather than housing or symbolizing it.” Colomina, “The Medical Body,” p. 235.

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surgeon, who epitomised the application of science in the transforming the body. Architects,

used to making reference to the body, had also been usurped: the modern body was defined

by surgery. To maintain cultural status, architects had to respond to this new kind of body.

The surgical body could be opened and repaired, realising the predictions of Descartes

and La Mettrie of the body as a machine. The surgical body was unconscious, transparent;

open to the gaze and control of the surgeon, reliant upon their authority and agency. The

surgical body was freshly washed and disinfected, draped in white, purged of impurities and

reduced to its essence. Modern architects adopted the role of the surgeon by applying a

range of metaphors and compositional devices to the architectural ‘body.’ Ornament was

removed, walls were covered in a grid of tiles or rendered white, glazing liberally splashed

about. ‘Functions’ were prioritised, inner workings, in the form of connection details,

rendered conspicuous. Geometries were purified, planes separated to avoid enclosure.

With modernism, for the first time, the wall lost its role as a barrier separating interior from

exterior; space was rendered contiguous. Giedion described this as a ‘new spatial

conception,’ uniting the concerns of previous architectures with a “hitherto unknown

interpenetration of inner and outer space.”104 The modernist body is no longer that which

animated classical anthropomorphism, a living body whose unity symbolises cosmic order.

It is instead the body as object, opened, fragmented, and analysed by anatomists, reduced

to a set of working parts revealed through dissection.

With modernism, also for the first time, architecture was to serve literally everybody.

The aim of providing housing for every citizen is one that responds to a statistical conception

of population, namely as a collection of persons who ‘counted’ in the eyes of the state, and

who were ‘counted’ accordingly. Such persons were defined by measurements of

acceptable minima; rights, in political terms, but also the right to health, education, and

housing. One of the earliest health provisions was immunisation, which relied for its

effectiveness on reaching entire populations. The importance to the state of such

programmes meant that they were rarely optional: thus statistics were used to prevent

103 Colomina, “The Medical Body,” p. 235. 104 Siegfried, Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: the growth of a new tradition, 5th ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

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disease as well. In endeavouring to provide every person with healthy housing, modern

architects aspired to emulate the heroic achievements of Koch and Pasteur.

Yet even as the effectiveness of Pasteurian medicine was being felt, so too was its social

presence changing. Having rescued the body from the threat of disease, the importance of

hygiene continued to be espoused: the mechanisms of promotion had found value in health.

Manufacturers found that from the desire for health had emerged the desire for social

acceptance, and with it, increased consumption of hygiene products. It is here that the

coercive nature of advertising first arises, appealing to the fear of death, playing on the fear

of social rejection, and promising the sexual gratification of pleasure and sensuality.105 The

miasmic threat of death overcome, new fears of embarrassment, through failing to remove

one’s own bodily excretions, are created.106 The rhetoric of this ‘culture of cleanliness’ also

tied social acceptance to financial success, as membership of the new managerial (‘white

collar’) class was sold as being dependent upon appearance.107

In the home, similar values were espoused. Expectations of domestic hygiene increased,

belying the technological promise of ‘labour-saving’ devices.108 The internalisation of wet

areas also meant that a new threat had arisen: the danger of embarrassment that might arise

when odours from these rooms permeated the rest of the house.109 The level of cleanliness

of the home and its occupants emerged as the responsibility of the mother, a visible symbol

of her devotion to her family.110 The successes of Pasteurian medicine had largely removed

the threat of infection, but in these ways it had been appropriated by industry and turned to

commercial ends. Through hygiene, consumption had become a ritual of modernity.

105 Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt, passim. 106 See Vincent Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in an Age of Advertisement, Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1992. 107“Advertisements for soaps, mouth washes, toothpastes, and deodorants in mass-circulation magazines showed working men and women how to cleanse themselves and become part of the increasingly sweatless, odorless, and successful business class.” Hoy, Chasing Dirt, p. 143-144. 108 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, New York: Basic Books, 1983. 109 “Cooking, bathroom, perspiration, smoking, and refrigerator odors were only a few of the many that might embarrass or disgust family and friends. Thus ‘smart’ housewives bought an excess of ‘freshening’ products, tackled all those jobs nobody liked, and killed unwanted odors.” Hoy, Chasing Dirt, p. 170.

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Modern Bodies

The direct application of technology to the body in the form of modern medicine

occurred within a broader discourse regarding both organisms and machines that was

occurring throughout the nineteenth century. On the one hand, processes by which natural

forms developed were being described through the dual influence of heredity and

environment, a tension resolved in part by Charles Darwin’s publication On the Origin of

Species in 1859. On the other hand, mechanisation of transport and industry was

transforming everyday life in the cities of Europe, drawing both support and criticism. These

discourses interwove, as organisms were described in mechanical terms, and technological

advances explained as a form of evolution.111 Both were interpreted through Hegelian

idealism to argue for the natural superiority of modern man, and to suggest further means of

advancement such as eugenics.112

The idea that technological forms were subject to the same evolutionary forces as natural

ones were influential in modernism. In Vers Une Architecture, Le Corbusier uses an

illustration of the evolution of automobile forms to suggest the relevance of biomorphic

analogies for architecture, inspired by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s influential On

Growth and Form of 1917.113 The clean lines of modernism were again responding to

fluid dynamics, this time in the form of streamlined bodies to facilitate movement. Regarding

design as a process of evolution also inspired Louis Sullivan’s theories about the relationship

between form and function, made manifest in the organic architecture of both Sullivan and

Frank Lloyd Wright.

Just as technology could be considered organic, so too organisms, especially the body,

could be considered technological. As extensions of the body, machines made the body

110 McLaughlin observes: “Much of the advertising for washing powders is designed to make housewives feel that they are neglectful wives and mothers unless they wash their family’s clothes with the particular powder offered.” McLaughlin, Coprophilia, p. 158. 111 Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, passim. 112 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 113 D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, abridged edition, edited by John Tyler Bonner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

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more powerful, more capable, speeding up the process of human evolution by carrying it on

outside, but still attached to, the body.114 The body is thus able to be seen as a hybrid

mechanical/organic creature, a mechanomorph, with machines prosthetically enhancing the

body.115 However, this evolutionary dream was far from the reality, with connection to

machines usually involving the drudgery and danger of industrial labour. This was the

situation documented by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, who described the problems that

technological advance represented for the labouring classes. With the advent of powered

machines, Marx argued, the relationship between technology and body is reversed. A tool

as an extension of the body allows the powers of the body to be magnified, extending their

reach out into the world. But equipped with engines, the machine is able to exceed the

body, so that now the body is an extension of the machine, subordinated to it. Through the

machine, labour becomes absorbed as one more extension of capital.116 The science of

work, exemplified by Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management of 1911,

reduced the body to one working part among many, made more efficient by minimising the

number of steps needed to complete its tasks. The influence of Taylorism is, however,

exaggerated: far greater efficiency was in fact achieved by Henry Ford’s assembly line, by

reducing the number of tasks performed by each body to one.

Marx’s criticism extended far beyond the appalling work conditions that prevailed in

factories since the industrial revolution. His was a criticism of alienation, the separation of

the worker from the task of making that technology had engendered. Rather than extending

and enhancing the body, machines in fact fragment the body, separating out attributes or

functions and rendering the remainder as obsolete. The body’s capacity for extension by the

machine is inverted into a body in need of extension, a body slow to evolve and lacking the

perfections of technology. This lack, Marx identified, was sustained by the fetish of

commodity. Capitalism benefits from the lack by promising completion through an endless

array of consumer goods, which in fact maintain the lack rather than resolving it.117

114 Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, p. 124. 115 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, p. 78. 116 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, p. 79. 117 Armstrong writes: “Modernity [...] brings both a fragmentation and augmentation of the body in relation to technology; it offers the body as lack, at the same time as it offers technological compensation. Increasingly, that compensation is offered as a part of capitalism’s fantasy of the complete body: in the mechanisms of advertising, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, and cinema; all

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The domestic environment that enveloped the body, protecting it from sensory intrusion,

was also transformed by the proliferation of consumer goods. The cosmetics and

appliances of the early twentieth century merely replaced the perfumes and furnishings of the

Victorian era, with which the home had been made into a place of sensory indulgence for the

body. Peter Gay has described the dissemination of bourgeois behaviours and artefacts as

‘democratisation of comfort.’118 He writes:

“The Horatian injunction to mingle the agreeable with the useful was in fact an undisputed article of nineteenth-century bourgeois faith. Objects should be pretty as well as utilitarian; an indispensable part of their function was to give pleasure.”119

Although the sensory excesses of the Victorian era were precisely what modern

architects were reacting against, the provision of comfort (albeit minimised) remained a goal

for modernism. The idea of comfort as ease or convenience is far from its original sense of

alleviating pain and fatigue by strengthening or fortifying. Seen in this way, comfort becomes

a means to mollify populations, to act, as Maldonado suggest, as a scheme for social

control.120 This is achieved firstly as comfort works to increase the productivity of labour

by restoring energies consumed in the world of work. Thomas Tierney echoes this view,

referring to this domestic function of ‘convenience.’121 Bodily demands for rest, food, and

ablution are an ‘inconvenience’ that limit or interfere with the use of time: through

technology, the modern household overcomes the demands of the body.122

The second way in which comfort acts to achieve social control, according to

Maldonado, is in its definition and delimitation of the family unit in both structure and

prosthetic in the sense that they promise the perfection of the body.” Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, p. 3. 118 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud; Volume 1, Education of the Senses, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 438ff. 119 Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, p. 441. 120 Tomás Maldonado, “The Idea of Comfort,” in Victor Margolin, and Richard Buchanan, (eds.) The Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, pp 248-256. 121 See Thomas F. Tierney, The Value of Convenience: A Genealogy of Technical Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 122 “[M]odernity treats the body [...] as the source of limits and barriers imposed upon persons. What these limits require is not planning and attention, but the consumption of various technological devices that allow people to avoid or overcome such limits. [...] The value of technology for the modern

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habitation. The provision of material comfort within the family home enables a ‘privacy’

which protects the family as a social unit. By “anchoring [the family] to a precise location,

tying it then to an interior,” the stability of the family is ensured.123 Sennett argues that the

emphasis on comfort, privacy and interiority, whether familial or individual, has the effect of

breaking down communication between persons that is essential for a full life.124 Following

E. M. Forster’s injunction, in Howard’s End, to ‘Only connect,’ Sennett is critical of the

isolation that comfort engenders. Comfort may lead to stability in social structures, a feeling

of contentment in individuals, but in doing so it prevents the myriad accidental exposures to

the lives of others that are possible in the city.125

From Soul to Self

As we have seen, the habitus of practices of grooming and dress can be seen as a

manifestation of converging and conflicting attitudes that arose, on the one hand, from

scientific (medical) conceptions of the body, and on the other, from social and cultural

conceptions of identity. These concepts and practices gave rise to a ‘technological’

construction of the body, from the perfumes that were used to adjust its scent to the spaces

arrayed around it for the purposes of grooming.126 These technologies, by focussing

attention on the body in increasingly private contexts, led to an increasing sense of

individuality, a self whose appearance could be controlled by adjustments to the body.

Scent receded as codes of cleanliness came to be expressed visually. Surfaces, both skin

and linen, emerged as demonstrations of inner purity, itself interpreted as a body free of

pollution rather than a soul free of corruption. In fact, with the emergence of bodily hygiene

and grooming, there had been a correlative decline in discourse about the soul. The idea of

an ‘inner life force’ by which vitalists attempted to maintain its currency was rejected by

household, therefore, lies in technology’s ability to mitigate the effect of bodily limits.” Tierney, The Value of Convenience, p. 38-39. 123 Maldonado, “The Idea of Comfort,” p. 249. 124 “If comfort lowered a person’s level of stimulation and receptivity, it could serve the person at rest in withdrawing from other people.” Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 339. 125 “Individualism and the fact of speed deaden the modern body; it does not connect.” Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 324.

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supporters of gas chemistry as ‘mere combustion.’ Many things had been discovered by

opening the body, but the soul was not one of them. As Sennett observes: “Empirical

observation could not locate the soul in the body.”127

What emerged in its stead was the liberal self, a central figure in the nascent democracies

of France and America. Hierarchic systems of the monarchic state were replaced with

medical models of the healthy body, blurring the boundaries between hygiene, science, and

city planning. The semblance of equality masked the use of hygiene as a bourgeois strategy

for controlling the poor, of freeing themselves from the threat of dirt, disease, and vice.

Surfaces of the city were made smooth to encourage the circulation that was vital for health;

water supply and drainage installed to facilitate the removal of waste. Architects adjusted

plan forms and fenestration to optimise ventilation, and articulated interior space into ever

smaller units for dealing with the body’s multifarious functions. Both the public presentation

of and private encounter with the ‘self’ was determined according to the physical conception

of the body, its need for health and hygiene. The body as mechanism necessitated

technological provision, of services throughout the city, and appliances within the home.

Servicing enabled the needs of the body, measured in terms of light, air, water, and energy,

to be met.

The utopian vision of the modern city was certainly inspired by technologies of industry

and engineering. Yet it was also inspired by technologies of medicine that had made the

promise of a healthy, happy future appear to be a reality. Its proponents were, perhaps,

also envious of the lionisation of Pasteur, the esteem of the surgeon, the status of the medical

profession, and the power of agency they held over the entire population. Surely

architecture, too, could promote the ‘virtue’ of cleanliness in and through the home of every

citizen. Yet just as they began to do so, a different problem was becoming evident.

Medicine’s success in the prevention of disease had created a sense of dissociation of the

body from the self. The fragmentation of the body in modernity is nowhere more

pronounced that in the perception that identity, associated with the mind, is somehow

separate from the body, located somewhere inside it. The more the body is controlled and

126 ‘Technological’ is here used in the sense, suggested by Ellul, of any manifest technique or practice. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage, 1964. 127 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 239.

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manipulated by medicine, the less it is perceived as the self. This phenomenon owes a great

deal to Cartesian metaphysics; as we have seen, Descartes’ anatomical researches led to the

body to be regarded in mechanical terms, separate from the mind within. Neither soul nor

self had been located as part of the human anatomy, in part justifying medical intervention,

yet also giving rise to a sense of the self as an inner depth.128 The body had been so well

attended to in the provision of health and comfort that it was no longer seen as part of the

self; instead the self was to be found somewhere within.

This sense of the self as separate from the body is inadvertently highlighted by

technology. Artifacts which extend the body can be seen to highlight the body as being in

need of extension, as somehow lacking, suffering from loss.129 We have seen how the

emergence of the modern sense of identity was reflected in the theory of ‘character’ at the

French Academy, whereby works of architecture were also given identity. This identity was

then ‘typified,’ normalised, in the typological theories of Durand. The emerging sense of

identity, however, served also to frustrate the Academy by rendering matters of judgement

or taste as mere expressions of individual preference. Modern architects reacted against this

problem by looking again to the body as a source of reference, reassured by the successes

of the medical profession. Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture, while celebrating

technology, also reads like a hygiene manual, promoting the house as a machine for cleaning

the body. The designs that followed at once conceal and reveal the body; providing private

spaces for ablution, yet rendering visible the consequences of the act. The architect emerges

as a surgeon, with the body correctly ordered, yet open to the gaze.

Meanwhile, medicine, having conquered the body, had begun to contemplate the

workings of the inner mind. Through the fields of psychology and psychiatry, the mind

emerged as one more territory suitable for medical investigation. In this way, it continued

128 Maldonado refers to “‘the destruction of the body’ in favour of the formation of the ‘person.’” Maldonado, The Idea of Comfort, p. 250. 129 This negative sense of the prosthetic, says Armstrong, was captured by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents: “In arguing that ‘with every tool man is perfecting his own organs’, Freud seems to propound a theory of organ-extension: sight is extended and perfected via the telescope and microscope; hearing via the telephone, memory by the gramophone.[...] But Freud also writes of technology under the sign of mourning. It supplies deficiencies and makes up for absences, correcting defects in sight, replacing a lost loved one; the house replaces the original loss, the womb. Lost body parts and objects—as in Freud’s thinking generally—are compensated for.” Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, p. 77.

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the desire for a clarification of the body, a rendering conscious of states of interiority. It is

these ideas of the inner ‘self,’ so central to modernity, which will now be addressed.

Chapter 4 The Lived Body: Architecture as Practice.

The tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone. They are mastered

gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. Walter Benjamin1

The Theory of Empathy

As well as being marked by the dramatic changes to public health addressed in the

previous chapter, the nineteenth century was also characterised by philosophical inquiry into

the body’s sensory engagement with the world.2 In contrast to the idealism of Schelling,

Fichte and Hegel, Kant’s description of aesthetic pleasure as the feeling of suitability of the

faculties for their purpose inspired a consideration of the subjective aspects of aesthetic

contemplation. In The World as Will and Representation, (1819-1844) Arthur

Schopenhauer sought to describe imagination as a physiological process.3 Influenced by the

1 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, third edition, London: Fontana, 1992, p. 233. 2 See Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds.) Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, Santa Monica: The Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994; also Crary, Techniques of the Observer, Chapter 3. 3 “What is imagination? A very complicated physiological occurrence in an animal’s brain, whose result is the consciousness of a picture or image at that very spot.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E.F.J. Payne, New York: Dover, 1966, vol. 2, p. 191.

The Lived Body 127

work of Xavier Bichat, Schopenhauer emphasised the link between the physiological and

philosophical dimensions of sensory experience, suggesting that Bichat’s work and his own

be read side by side.4 In Bichat’s physiology, life was regarded as the cumulative effect of

various organs and processes, with each responsible for different functions of the body, such

as movement, thought and sensation. The resultant fragmentation of the body was, for

Schopenhauer, essential for aesthetic experience. The perception of beauty required freeing

the senses from the demands of the body, suspending knowledge of the self in order to

become a pure, will-less subject of knowing.5 Described by Schopenhauer as ‘objectivity,’

this suspension of the self is particularly evident in relation to architecture, which, being less

representational than other arts, is able to convey more fundamental forces such as

gravitation and strength.6

This loss of the self in acts of aesthetic perception, while essential to the emergence of

empathy theory, was also the basis of early psychological studies, with philosophical and

physiological inquiry combining to explain the role of the senses in the experience of beauty

and art. In Mikrokosmos, Herman Lotze argued that emotive aspects of sensation are due

to the projection of the self into the experience of forms.7 It is through our own

corporeality, our own experience of bodily forces, that we interpret the world, reading into it

the ‘joy and sorrow’ of existence.8 Robert Vischer described this projection of the self into

the world of objects as ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung, literally in-feeling).9 Vischer noted the

4 Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, 1799. See also Elizabeth Haigh, Xavier Bichat and the Medical Theory of the Eighteenth Century, London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1984. “[…] his reflections and mine mutually support each other, since his are the physiological commentary on mine, and mine are the philosophical commentary on his; and we shall best be understood by being read together side by side.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, p. 261. 5 Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, p. 9. 6 “[…] architecture affects us not only mathematically but dynamically and […] what speaks to us through it is not mere form and symmetry but rather those fundamental forces of nature, those primary Ideas, those lowest grades of the will’s objectivity.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol 1, p. 215. 7 Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and His Relation to the World, translated by Elizabeth Hamilton and E.E. Constance Jones, New York: Scribner and Wellford, 1886. 8 “The world becomes alive to us through this power to see in forms the joy and sorrow of the existence that they hide; […] no form is so unyielding that our imagination cannot project its life into it.” Lotze, Microcosmus, vol. 1, p. 584; As cited in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, p. 20. 9 Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form: a Contribution to Aesthetics, in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds.) Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, Santa Monica: The Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994, pp. 89-123.

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importance of a correlation between the form of an object and the bodily or sensory

structure of the perceiving subject, referred to as ‘similarity’. This meant that aesthetic

pleasure could result from the way in which an object emulated either the form of the body

or its senses. It also meant that pleasure could result from objects which invoked a

correspondence between the senses, leading to “a strengthening or weakening of the general

vital sensation.”10 This projection of the body and its senses into the world of objects

culminates in the feeling of empathy, arising from the projection of our sense of self inside the

object. This also has a reciprocal effect, with objects themselves becoming an analogy for

our own structure. According to Vischer, empathetic projection enables the self to be

determined as it is imaginatively enveloped in the object being sensed: “I wrap myself within

its contours as in a garment.”11 The projection of the self into objects also provides a basis

for explaining artistic production. Rather than imitating nature, artists strive to capture their

own ‘vital sensation’ in sensuous form. Art becomes a means to overcome the limitations of

the self, to transform the variability of human emotion into a beautiful object, and thereby to

‘objectify’ the human condition. The more pure the form, the more easily it invites empathic

projection, giving rise to an harmonious emotional experience.12

In his Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, Heinrich Wölfflin considered the

problem of how architectural forms are able to express an emotion or mood.13 Influenced

by Vischer’s ideas of empathy, Wölfflin begins by identifying the anthropomorphic basis of

perception. It is only because we have a body, he writes, that we are able to identify with

the conditions of other forms: “Physical forms possess a character only because we

ourselves possess a body.”14 Yet in applying Vischer’s notion of empathy to architecture,

10 Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form, p. 99. 11 “[…] an objective but accidentally experienced phenomenon always provokes a related idea of the self in sensory or motor form. […] The way in which the phenomena is constructed also becomes an analogy for my own structure. I wrap myself within its contours as in a garment.” Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form, p. 101. 12 Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, pp. 26-27. 13 Heinrich Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, in Mallgrave and Ikonomou (eds.) Empathy, Form, and Space, pp. 149-190. 14 (original italics). “If we were purely visual beings, we would always be denied an aesthetic judgement of the physical world. But as human beings with a body that teaches us the nature of gravity, contraction, strength, and so on, we gather the experience that enables us to identify with the conditions of other forms. […] We have carried loads and experienced pressure and counter pressure, we have collapsed to the ground when we no longer had the strength to resist the downward pull of our bodies, and that is why we can appreciate the noble serenity of a column and understand the tendency

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Wölfflin transforms it from an explanation of aesthetic sensation into a means of

interpretation. “Forms become meaningful to us” he writes, “only because we recognize in

them the expression of a sentient soul. Instinctively we animate each object. This is a

primeval instinct of man.”15 Empathy allows objects to be read as manifestation of vital

force. In contrast to the tendency of matter to succumb to formlessness, to collapse to the

ground under the force of gravity, he identifies an opposing force, or will, that can be

transferred to objects. Between matter and form is a tension or opposition that Wölfflin

describes as ‘force of form’ [Formkraft]. The very force that holds our bodies upright can

be transposed into objects, resulting in the animation of inanimate matter.16

Following Schopenhauer, Wölfflin acknowledges the importance to architecture of the

fundamental forces of weight and strength, and its inability to express the full range of human

emotions. Yet for Wölfflin, these fundamental forces are the principal theme of architecture,

its expression of material and form, gravity and force: “Its subject remains the great vital

feelings, the moods that presuppose a constant and stable body condition.”17 Architecture

is experienced through direct bodily feelings, which serve to emphasise this vital force.

Powerful columns give rise to ‘energetic stimulation,’ large spaces expand our breathing, and

asymmetry is experienced as physical pain, “as if a limb were missing or injured.”18 The

ensuing reading of architectural styles relates largely to their differing effects upon movement,

breathing, or posture of the body. Wölfflin writes of the ‘still and restful lines’ of Doric

temples, the ‘quicker movement’ of the Ionic, the ‘breathless haste’ of Arab ornament, the

‘dignified calm’ of Romanesque, and the ‘restless pressing forward’ of the northern

of all matter to spread out formlessly on the ground.” Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, p. 151. 15 Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, p. 152. 16 “We know the force of gravity from our own body. What holds us upright and prevents a formless collapse? It is the opposing force that we may call will, life, or whatever. I call it force of form [Formkraft]. The opposition between matter and force of form, which sets the entire organic world in motion, is the principal theme of architecture. Aesthetic perception even transposes that most intimate experience of our own body onto inanimate nature. We assume that in everything there is a will that struggles to become form and has to overcome the resistance of a formless matter.” Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, p. 159. 17 Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, p. 152. 18“Powerful columns energetically stimulate us; our respiration harmonizes with the expansive or narrow nature of the space. In the former case we are stimulated as if we ourselves were the supporting columns; in the latter case we breathe as deeply and fully as if our chest were as wide as the hall. Asymmetry is often experienced as physical pain, as if a limb were missing or injured. Likewise we know

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Gothic.19 The consistency of each particular style within its historical and social context

leads Wölfflin to consider the problem of architecture as an expression of the attitudes of a

people. Style is seen to emerge not as a consequence of individual will but of popular

sentiment, as those who create immerse themselves into the ‘character’ of their nation.

Architecture, however, as the slowest of all cultural forms in responding to changes in

character, is susceptible to alienation, to a continued use of forms sustained only by tradition.

Such forms, writes Wölfflin, are ‘falsely applied’, and are thus ‘completely deprived of

life.’20

For Wölfflin, the then emergent field of psychology promised to provide a foundation for

art history in the same way that mechanics provided a grounding for physics. Psychology

was thus regarded as a way to overcome the split between human and natural science, a

science of the mind that would confirm the role of art in the constitution of knowledge.

Although never seriously challenging the dominance of natural science, psychology and

psychoanalytic theory certainly proved highly influential in the study of art and architecture

during the twentieth century.21 Yet in Wölfflin’s theory, psychology is a means to understand

the relationship between architecture and the body, with the psychological study of art seen

to be grounded by the body, that ‘constant denominator’ linking the variations in attitude

between persons within and across cultures.22 It is this link between mind and body that

justified psychology as a field of medicine during the nineteenth century, motivated by the

belief that madness was a disease that could be cured by manipulation or treatment.23 No

longer a matter of divine aberration, madness began to be addressed as a medical problem,

asylums transformed from municipal or religious charities into medical institutions. These

the disagreeable condition that is induced by looking at something unbalanced, and so on.” Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, pp. 154-155. 19 Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, pp. 170-171. 20 Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, pp. 184-185. 21 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, New York, International Universities Press, 1953 (1908); Richard Wollheim (ed.), The Image in Form: selected writings of Adrian Stokes; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation, 5th ed. London: Phaidon, 1977; Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977; Hal Foster Compulsive beauty, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993; Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. 22 Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, p. 184.

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became veritable laboratories for experimentation, with inmates subjected to a range of

often cruel and inhuman treatments. The asylum became the major site in which medical

knowledge and state authority demonstrated a complicity in the constitution and control of

the self.24 Various corporeal manipulations were justified by psychological theories that

regarded the body as one means to access an ‘inner’ self. This inner self was seen to be

revealed through the analysis of dreams and hypnotism, both of which were to form

fundamental strategies of Freud’s psychotherapy.25 Psychoses were not only the

prerogative of the mad, however, and psychotherapy soon became a means to access one’s

inner self in order to overturn the repression of traumatic experiences of loss caused by

separation and desire. Popular interest in psychology, suggests Armstrong, reveals a desire

for the disclosure of inner states, the achievement of ‘clarification’ of the body, “a rendering

conscious of states of interiority.”26

The Lived Body

In seeking to establish the way in which an inner self or mind related to architecture

through the mediation of the body, empathy theory depended upon a combination of

physiological and psychological interpretations of sensory experience. Tempered by the

Cartesian dualism of mind and body, much of nineteenth century psychology sought to

identify the way in which the senses distorted our experience of objects and thereby

prevented true knowledge of the world. It is this problem that motivated Husserl’s call for a

return to ‘the things themselves’, an attempt to uncover their essence. His study of the way

23 As Porter observes: “[...] most nineteenth-century physicians maintained that insanity was ultimately rooted in the organism, particularly the brain; for that reason, therapy needed to be incorporated within a medical model, and prescribed by physicians.” Porter, The Greatest Benefit, p. 498. 24 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization. See also Roy Porter, Mind-forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency, London: Athlone, 1987; Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987; Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 25 “To some degree against the hopelessness of asylum psychiatry, [...] a new dynamic psychiatry appeared in the late nineteenth century. Its historical roots include Mesmer’s therapeutic use of ‘animal magnetism’, later called hypnotism by the Manchester Surgeon James Braid. With its dissociations and apparent automatisms of behaviour, hypnotism unveiled hitherto hidden dimensions and layers of the personality and raised new issues about the will, unconscious thinking, and the unity of the self.” Porter, The Greatest Benefit, p. 513.

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phenomena present themselves to the mind led to his proposal for a ‘phenomenological

reduction,’ a method of bracketing things off from their cultural context in order to achieve

access to the ‘life-world,’ or world of immediate experience.27 Although originally playing

down the role of the body in the constitution of knowledge, Husserl later acknowledged the

difficulty of this task. As a medium of understanding, the body was seen as essentially

different from objects in the world, its surface constituting a radical discontinuity. While

space in general can be regarded as homogenous, Husserl observed, “the lived body and

its bodily space break the homogeneity asunder.”28 Although not further developed by

Husserl, this acknowledgment of the body was to prove influential for his students,

Heidegger and Sartre, as well as for Merleau-Ponty, who founded the journal Les Temps

Modernes with Sartre in 1945.29 It is Merleau-Ponty in particular who sought to investigate

the role of the body in the constitution of knowledge.

In Phenomenology of Perception,30 Merleau-Ponty examines those psychological

studies concerned with the way in which understanding is possible through sensory exchange

with the world. He begins by rejecting the claims by Kant and Descartes that there is an

originary point of consciousness from which all else could be deduced. Any ‘objective’

explanation of the world is seen as problematic, since such an explanation must be derived

from our experience of that world from the limited perspective of a body. To regard

sensory experience as an impediment to an accurate, ‘scientific’, conception of the world is

to fail to acknowledge that such experience is necessarily prior to any explanation of it.31

Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty argues that the reductions of science constitute a

‘withdrawal’ from the world in which we find ourselves. Acknowledging the primacy of

26 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, p. 5. 27 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. See also Joseph J. Kockelmans, (ed.) Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and its Interpretation, Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books, 1967. 28 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, (original italics). As cited in Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 29 Merleau-Ponty’s essays were later published in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. 31 “Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of that world. [...] To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge

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experience makes the world itself, and not subjective consciousness, the source of

knowledge. The world necessarily exceeds consciousness, and constitutes for it an

inexhaustible source of wonder. The subject emerges only in the process of moving beyond

itself, and towards that world.32

The self is dependent upon the senses for its connection to the world. Rather than

acknowledging that dependence, argues Merleau-Ponty, scientific attempts to explain the

workings of the senses reinforce the boundary between self and world that occurs at the

surface of the body. Although perception is our only possible access to such a reality, it is,

in its variability, viewed as inferior to it. In the Müller-Lyer’s illusion, for example, two lines

made different due to their context are posited as being ‘the same’ in some objective, prior,

and privileged reality. In this way, experiential phenomena are constrained by their

conformity to scientific principles, and are denied their tolerance of contextual variation and

ambiguity.33 Through perception, objects are understood not with reference to some

objective reality, but to their importance or meaning in relation to the body. It was only

through a denial of the body’s significance for sensory experience, its reduction to a means

of transmitting information, that subject and object were conceived as separate.

This separation of subject and object was particularly evident with the sense of sight,

giving to the subject the quality of an impartial spectator, “an interior without exterior.”34

For Merleau-Ponty, however, vision occurs between perceiving subject and perceived

object, with meaning, rather than inhering in the object, coming from their interaction.

Anything seen is ‘already inhabited by a meaning’, perceived or anticipated in relation to the

always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. vii-ix. 32 “Husserl’s transcendental is not Kant’s and Husserl accuses Kant’s philosophy of being ‘worldly’, because it makes use of our relation to the world, which is the motive force of the transcendental deduction, and makes the world immanent in the subject, instead of being filled with wonder at it and conceiving the subject as a process of transcendence towards the world. […]The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xiii-xvii. 33“[Science] forces the phenomenal universe into categories which make sense only in the universe of science. It requires that two perceived lines, like two real lines, should be equal or unequal, [...] without realizing that the perceived, by its nature, admits of the ambiguous, the shifting, and is shaped by its context. In Müller-Lyer’s illusion, one of the lines ceases to be equal to the other without becoming ‘unequal’: it becomes ‘different’. That is to say, an isolated, objective line, and the same line taken as a figure, cease to be, for perception, ‘the same’.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 11. 34 “[…] while the living body became an exterior without interior, subjectivity became an interior without exterior, an impartial spectator.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 56.

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body.35 In contrast to the notion of the perceiving subject as a passive recipient of

information about the world, Merleau-Ponty emphasises the way in which that world is

perceived in its potential for interaction, engagement, or inhabitation. This complicity of

subject and object in the constitution of meaning depends in large part upon the variation of

vision, upon the way in which the body is able to move in relation to other objects. Through

both its capacity for movement and its role as perceptual apparatus, the body emerges as

fundamentally different to the objects of perception.

To begin, the body demonstrates a primacy not shared by other objects. Instead it is

that with which we are able to understand objects, the necessary precondition that allows

access to the world of objects. “[The body] is my basic habit, the one which conditions all

the others, and by means of which they are mutually comprehensible.”36 The body is more

than an object, “ [...] it is that by which there are objects.”37 And elsewhere: “The body is

our general medium for having a world.”38 As the means by which the world is available to

us through perception, the body must always be present, regardless of the variety of objects

available for perception. The body demonstrates a ‘primordial presence’ over its perceptual

field.39 The body also demonstrates a persistence of presence that distinguishes it from

other objects. An object available for perception could equally be absent, exchanged for

another, removed from my perceptual field. The body, however, is “an object which does

not leave me.”40

The body is literally indispensable as a means of perception. Its constant presence leads

it to resist the normal means by which objects are experienced. To overcome the limitation

of perspective, whereby only one side of an object is available to perception, usually

requires variation in the relative position of body and object. To change perspective, I can

35“Vision is already inhabited by a meaning (sens) which gives it a function in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. The pure quale would be given to us only if the world were a spectacle and one’s own body a mechanism with which some impartial mind made itself acquainted. Sense experience, on the other hand, invests the quality with vital value, grasping it first in its meaning for us, for that heavy mass which is our body, whence it comes about that it always involves a reference to the body.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 52. 36 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 91. 37 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 92. 38 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 146. 39 “The presence and absence of external objects are only variations within a field of primordial presence, a perceptual domain over which my body exercises power.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 92.

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either move the object in relation to my body, or move my body in relation to the object (or

both together). That is, I can move it around, or move around it, to build up an image of

various aspects. In this relation, the body is normally the means, and not itself an object, of

perception. In fact the act of perception precludes the body from itself being so perceived:

“In so far as it sees or touches the world, my body can therefore be neither seen nor

touched.”41 It is possible to perceive some parts of the body as though they are an object

at a distance, but much of the body is resistant to such perception. There are parts of my

body that can never be seen except indirectly, parts that can be touched only in a contorted

manner. This resistance to perception increases nearer to the body’s perceptual apparatus:

“My visual body is certainly an object as far as its parts far removed from my head are

concerned, but as we come nearer to the eyes, it becomes divorced from objects, and

reserves among them a quasi-space to which they have no access.”42 Attempts to perceive

the body are confounded by this resistance. The persistence of the body makes it resistant

to the variation of perspective by which other objects are perceived. The body’s

perspective upon itself is fixed, a fixity that movement cannot alter. “[The body] defies

exploration and is always presented to me from the same angle. [...] To say that it is always

near me, always there for me, is to say that it is never really in front of me, that I cannot

array it before my eyes, that it remains marginal to all my perceptions, that it is with me.”43

This persistence of the body means that its movement is of a different kind to that of objects.

It is not an object to be moved, but is rather an object that is carried along with any

volitional movement. “My body itself I move directly, I do not find it at one point of

objective space and transfer it to another, I have no need to look for it, it is already with

me”. 44

Following Merleau-Ponty, Drew Leder describes the body’s resistance to reflexive

perception as a form of ‘disappearance’.45 As perceptual apparatus, our sensory organs

40 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 90. 41 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 92. 42 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 91-92. 43 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 90. 44 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 94. 45 Drew Leder, The Absent Body, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Leder’s work provides a reading of somatic phenomenology from a medical perspective, detailing the way in which medical knowledge of the body differs from lived experience.

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are unable to direct that focus upon themselves, demonstrating a ‘focal disappearance’ in

relation to their own position at the centre of their perceptual field.46 Eyes cannot ‘see

themselves’, unless aided by an externalised image in a mirror or photograph. Nor can they

perceive their own perceptual activity: the act of sensing is not itself available to sensory

experience. As Sartre explains, although I can see, “I cannot ‘see the seeing’.”47 Not only

do the senses resist thematisation, many of the body’s internal processes–digestion,

circulation, respiration, thermal regulation, and the organs that carry out these tasks–occur

outside of perception or volition.48 Merleau-Ponty refers to the “concentrated darkness of

my bodily organs,” emphasised by the resistance of the body interior to direct visual

perception.49 When the body does become the object of attention, it does so imperiously,

demanding attention because its regular operation has become in some way problematic.

Leder describes this as a phenomenon of ‘dys-appearance’. Sensations of hunger, fatigue,

or pain act to direct the body away from its pursuits, and toward strategies of overcoming

adverse sensation.50 The sensation of pain, in particular, directs attention inwards, its

aversiveness motivating the desire to expel it from the body, to return to a body without

pain. Thus pain is often experienced as alien, the unwanted consequence of a disease or

injury that has invaded or damaged the body.51

These forms of differentiation from the world of objects render the surface of the body

as a point of inflection, across which perception is fundamentally altered. At the surface of

the body, the perception of objects gives way to the experience of perception, the living out

of the lived body in its engagement with the world. The body, in its persistent presence,

takes over from the world as a collection of objects, to be understood only through

experience: “I cannot understand the function of the living body,” writes Merleau-Ponty,

“except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the

46“Precisely as the center point from which the perceptual field radiates, the perceptual organ remains an absence or nullity in the midst of the perceived.” Leder, The Absent Body, p. 13. 47 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 304. 48 Leder, The Absent Body, pp. 45-46. 49 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 326. 50 “The highly affective and significant call of pain renders unimportant projects that previously seemed crucial. […] Space loses its normal directionality as the world ceases to be the locus of purposeful action.” Leder, The Absent Body, p. 75. 51 Patients will often refer to the pain as an ‘it,’ separate from the ‘I.’ Leder, The Absent Body, p. 76.

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world.”52 Moreover, the multiplicity of external objects gives way at the surface of the body

not to a collection of perceptual apparatuses, but to a singular, unified body: “The outline of

my body is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations do not cross. This is because its parts

are inter-related in a peculiar way: they are not spread out side by side but enveloped in

each other. [...] I am in undivided possession of it”.53

While the body is always the central term in any experience of the world of objects, it is

itself, as a means of perception, only understood in relation to that world. This leads

Merleau-Ponty to describe the body as both an “anchorage in a world”54, and as a “pivot of

the world.”55 The body as pivot mediates between the world as it impacts upon our body,

and our body as it projects out into the world. Thus sensations present themselves, writes

Merleau-Ponty, “as certain kinds of symbiosis, certain ways the outside has of invading us

and certain ways we have of meeting this invasion,”.56 And elsewhere: “[…] my body is a

movement towards the world, and the world my body’s point of support.”57 Because of

this ‘movement towards the world,’ it is touch that emerges as the paradigmatic sense, the

model by which sensation in general can be understood. The body, as material and

movement, renders sensation tactile. In arguing the significance of touch in understanding,

Merleau-Ponty makes explicit the rejection of Kant’s conceptual synthesis, while at the

same time rejecting the Cartesian universality of vision as a vanity.58

Touch reveals the body as a thickness at the centre of the world, able to connect with

the world by reaching out towards it, and extending into it. For Merleau-Ponty, this

52 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 75. 53 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 98. 54 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 144. 55 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 82. 56 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 317; Or in a more poetic flourish, “[...] the world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the shore.” p. 207. 57 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 350. 58“It is not consciousness which touches or feels, but the hand, and the hand is, as Kant says, an ‘outer brain of man’. In visual experience, which pushes objectification further than does tactile experience, we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the other hand, adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me, and is not centred in me. It is not I who touch, it is my body.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 316.

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reaching out into the world denies the passive role of the spectator, and instead suggests a

certain motivation, an active engagement with the world whose meaning and purpose are

related back to the body. The body’s ‘projection’ out into the world is directed by its

projects, the purposes for which it engages with the world. The body, for Merleau-Ponty,

is a ‘vehicle of being’.59 It is an intermediary, orienting and directing the self in its relation to

the world, carrying consciousness toward the objects of its attention. ‘Consciousness’ is not

an awareness of things as such, but an awareness of their useability. It is a ‘being-towards-

the-thing’ that is mediated by the body.60

Together, these various ways in which the body differentiates itself act to counter

Cartesian dualism, the relegation of the body to the world of objects. First, the body

demonstrates a primacy, taking a position as the first object, as that which makes possible

the experience of all others. Second, the body demonstrates a constancy and a fixity with

relation to its own perceptual apparatus, thereby resisting strategies of perceptual

investigation. Third, it demonstrates a disembodiment, effacing itself as an object of

perception as a result of its outward focus. Fourth, it demonstrates a boundedness or

limitation, within which its parts are enveloped in each other and possessed together as a

unity. Finally, it attempts to overcome that limitation by moving out into the world, engaging

with it actively in the course of its projects.

Inhabited Space

This movement towards the world involves more than the mere perception of objects.

Instead the body accumulates and appropriates objects, temporarily including them within its

scope or limit. Such objects are acquired and used by the body as part of its projects, in its

active engagement with the world. With the example of a blind man’s stick, Merleau-Ponty

describes the way in which objects are ‘incorporated’ in order to extend or amplify our

59“The body is a vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 82. 60 “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think’ but of ‘I can’. [...] Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. [...] to move one’s body is to aim at things through it.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 137-139.

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sensory apparatus, resulting in a ‘dilation’ of our being.61 Heidegger calls such objects

‘equipment’ (Zeug), handled or manipulated by the body in its dealings with the world.62

Equipment has its own kind of ‘knowledge,’ a familiarity that blurs the distinction between

body and object. Moreover, such objects are often retained for future use, demonstrating a

potentiality that Heidegger describes as a ‘readiness-to-hand’.63 This placement of objects

near to the body suggests that the relation between the two is spatially mediated. According

to Heidegger, things ‘ready-to-hand’ occur within a region (Gegend), that space in which

objects can be related to the body in terms of both directionality and proximity. Any

abstracted conception of space, he argues, must originate in the spatiality of the ready-to-

hand, and must be derived from it.64

For Merleau-Ponty, the space between objects and the body is also instrumental in

perception. He describes space as a form of ‘potential’ that enables an adjustment in the

relative position of body and object. Characterised by touch, perception entails an

engagement of the body as it either moves objects or moves around them. The resultant

variation in perspective allows a complex image of an object to be pieced together, taking

into account not only its appearance from various viewpoints, but also other qualities such as

smell, texture, temperature, elasticity, density, or weight. While this variation allows some

degree of abstraction, the idea of an object outside of perception is, for Merleau-Ponty,

untenable.65 Instead, objects are understood by ‘inhabiting’ them, by examining from

various perspectives their location and character, that is, by placing the body as far as

61 “To get used to a hat, a car, or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 143. 62 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 95-98. 63 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98. 64 “The ‘above’ is what is ‘on the ceiling’; the ‘below’ is what is ‘on the floor’; the ‘behind’ is what is ‘at the door’; all “wheres” are discovered and circumspectively interpreted as we go our ways in everyday dealings; they are not ascertained and catalogued by the observational measurement of space.” Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 136-137. 65 “Our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had or could have. For example, I see the next -door house from a certain angle, but it would be seen differently from the right bank of the Seine, or from the inside, or again from an aeroplane: the house itself is none of these appearances: it is, as Leibnitz said, the geometrized projection of these perspectives and of all possible perspectives, that is, the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived, the house seen from nowhere. But what do these words mean? Is not to see always to see from somewhere? To say that the house itself is seen from nowhere is surely to say that it is invisible!” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 67.

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possible into the position of the object. Yet in the perception of any particular object, the

space that surrounds it as potential is already inhabited by other objects, objects which

imply another viewpoint back upon the object being perceived. Taken together, objects

form a ‘system’ or ‘world’, where the perception of each implies, and in turn is implied by,

the perception of all others.66 Objects ‘display themselves’, their relative positions making

them available for perception, alternately coming into focus or receding from view. Space

demonstrates a potentiality by enabling the perception of objects, yet its potential is

sustained as objects are complicit in each other’s perception, ‘mirroring’ each other, and

thereby obviating the need to move among them. This relation between objects leaves them

open to perception, making them translucent. Merleau-Ponty writes:

“Our previous formula must therefore be modified; the house itself is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object is translucent, being shot through from all sides by an infinite number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden.”67

In describing the perception of objects as ‘inhabitation,’ Merleau-Ponty frequently refers

to those objects that are literally inhabited, such as a house or flat, along with the objects

they contain. Throughout Phenomenology of Perception, the house appears as both a

manifestation and a metaphor of embodied perception. To choose among the objects that

‘display themselves’ to perception, to concentrate or focus upon one particular object, is to

‘open’ that object, to ‘continue inside’ it an exploration that previously enveloped them all.68

66 “To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other or behind me. In other words: to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it . But in so far as I see those things too, they remain abodes open to my gaze, and, being potentially lodged in them, I already perceive from various angles the central object of my present vision. Thus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table, can ‘see’; but back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it ‘shows’ to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so far as objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats the others round it as spectators of its hidden aspects and as guarantee of the permanence of those aspects. Any seeing of an object by me is instantaneously reiterated among all those objects in the world which are apprehended as co-existent, because each of them is all that the others ‘see’ of it.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 68-69. 67 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 68-69. 68 “To see an object is either to have it on the fringe of the visual field and be able to concentrate on it, or else respond to this summons by actually concentrating upon it. When I do concentrate my eyes on it, I become anchored in it, but this coming to rest of the gaze is merely a modality of its movement: I

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A house or flat is significant as an object that can be entered, occupied, and inhabited by the

body. Moreover, inhabited space is known not as a series of images, but as a collection of

objects whose spatial organisation is ‘in’ the body, tied to it by ‘threads’ of intentionality.69

Space and the body are understood reciprocally, through movement and orientation,

measurement and location, familiarity and identity. And like the body, inhabited space tends

to recede from perception, to become familiar through habituation, what Leder describes as

‘disappearance.’70 Defined by those object appropriated by the body, inhabited space

becomes part of the taken for granted apparatus of interaction with the world, an expression

of the body’s ability to ‘dilate’ or extend outwards into the world.71 This outward extension

enables the demands of the body, its need for food, rest, or ablution, to be prepared for in

advance. Instead of suffering from hunger or fatigue, I can simply move toward a particular

space, created and maintained in anticipation precisely in order to satisfy that need. In this

way, domestic space can be seen as an ordering of the world to cope with the demands of

the body, making interior sensations manifest in the external ordering of objects. Seen as

comfort or convenience, however, domestic space can also be seen to ‘silence’ the body, to

further effect its disappearance from view.72

continue inside one object the exploration which earlier hovered over them all, and in one movement I close up the landscape and open the object.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 67. 69 “When I move about my house, I know without thinking about it that walking towards the bathroom means passing near the bedroom, that looking at the window means having the fireplace on my left, and in this small world each gesture, each perception is immediately located in relation to a great number of possible co-ordinates.” pp. 129-130; “My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as long as I still have ‘in my hands’ or ‘in my legs’ the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it.” p. 130; “When I walk round my flat, the various aspects in which it presents itself to me could not possibly appear as views of one and the same thing if I did not know that each of them represents the flat seen from one spot or another, and if I were unaware of my own movements, and of my body as retaining its identity through the stages of those movements.” p. 203. 70 “As I go through the day, my extended body ebbs and flows, now absorbing things, now casting them back onto shore. I do not notice my body, but neither do I, for the most part, notice the bed on which I sleep, the clothes I wear, the chair on which I sit down to breakfast, the car I drive to work. I live in bodies beyond bodies, clothes, furniture, room, house, city, recapitulating in ever expanding circles aspects of my corporeality. As such, it is not simply my surface organs that disappear but entire regions of the world with which I dwell in intimacy.” Leder, The Absent Body, p. 35. 71 “Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, of changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 143. 72 See Maldonado, “The Idea of Comfort,” Tierney, The Value of Convenience, and Leder, The Absent Body. In “Policing the Body,” Andrew Benjamin notes Descartes’ omission of the body from his revolutionary project. Although promoting the destruction of existing philosophical systems, argues Benjamin, Descartes was eager to preserve the comfort afforded by his ‘stove heated room.’ Andrew Benjamin, “Policing the Body: Descartes and the architecture of change,” In Neil Leach (ed.)

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In his later work, Merleau-Ponty develops the idea of the body as a ‘thickness’ at the

centre of perception through the concept of the ‘chiasm.’ The body’s tendency toward self-

effacement during perception can be overcome in part through the reflexive application of

touch. As the characteristic sense, touch reveals the surface of the body as a point of

inflection, across which sensory experience of the world gives way to sensation of the body.

These sensations, although different, together form that necessary exchange between self

and world that makes perception possible. The surface of the body is a point of both

crossing and connection between self and world, an ‘intertwining’ that enables our senses to

interrogate the world. This connection, or ‘chiasm,’ is highlighted by the act of touching of

one hand with another, revealing the inextricable link between our senses and the world. He

writes:

“Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are [...] the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand, which is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it; the two systems are applied upon one another, as the two halves of an orange.”73

This intertwining between self and world Merleau-Ponty calls flesh. Flesh is that primal

element out of which subject and world are born in mutual relation, of which touching and

the tangible are different, but interwoven, manifestations. Flesh is that relation of the sensible

with itself that makes the lived body possible, which constitutes it in its incorporation in the

world. Each of our senses, he writes, “[...] must be inscribed in the order of being that it

discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at. [...]

Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 73 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p 133. Sartre also acknowledge this fundamental relationship: “The structure of the world demands that we cannot see without being visible.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 317.

The Lived Body 143

he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it”.74

Enmeshed in flesh, the senses intermerge: they are different manifestations of the one body.

This is true not only of the various senses (“[...] every visible is cut out in the tangible, every

tactile being in some manner promised to visibility”75) but also in the orientation of the body.

The body is always located, its sense of its own position established in relation to an

inhabited space, and in the relation to ground that it shares with all objects.

That parallel is also manifest in the intertwining of self and other through mutual

perspective. Flesh opens out an ‘intercorporeal’ being, where the experience of sensation

binds each to the other, as the connection between the sentient and the sensible

encompasses all bodies. “each is bound to every other vision, to every other touch; [...] the

little private world of each is not juxtaposed to the world of all the others, but surrounded by

it, levied off from it [...]. Now why would this generality, which constitutes the unity of my

body, not open it to other bodies?”76 The intertwining of sentience and the sensible is

particularly evident in the case of reflexive touch, the touching of one hand by the other. The

reversibility of sensation is always imminent, never complete; there is a ‘hiatus’ between

hands that touch as one always touching, the other being touched. In this way the opening

out of the world into the sentient and the sensible, the separation of flesh through an initial

‘fission’ or ‘dehiscence,’ is prevented from disappearing as they fold back upon each other,

forming identity in difference. The intertwinings are made possible by a ‘thickness’ between

sentience and sensation that arises from their incomplete closure, and enables their

transitivity to occur:

“[...] the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility and for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication. [...] The thickness of the body, far from rivalling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of the things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh.”77

74 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp 134-135 (original italics). [Vision, of course, being a particular variant of touch, since it “[...] envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things.” p. 133.] 75 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 134. 76 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 142. 77 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 135.

The Lived Body 144

Planar metaphors of the body, as having ‘two sides’ or ‘two leaves’ by which it is both

sentient and sensible, are insufficient to describe the thickness of the body arising from this

inexact folding. Instead the intertwining of one in the other can be seen as “[...] two circles,

or two vortexes, or two spheres, concentric when I live naïvely, and as soon as I question

myself, the one slightly decentered with respect to the other....”78 The rich array of

metaphors used by Merleau-Ponty reveal a self that is not predetermined by some

interiority, but which emerges out of the variety of inversions, enfoldings, and decenterings

that are the necessary consequence of the sensory engagement of the body in the world.

The self emerges from the crossings, or ‘chiasms,’ that arise from the incomplete folding

back upon itself of sensation and the sensible, their necessary thickness in flesh.

Tactile Space

These phenomenological themes have come to influence a great

deal of architectural theory and production during the twentieth

century. The foremost proponent of phenomenology has been the

Norwegian critic Christian Norberg-Schulz, whose celebration of

‘place’ instead of ‘space’ is derived largely from Heideggerian

ontology.79 The desire to apply modernism’s rationalist principles

to the human or psychological dimension of architecture constitutes

what Colin St John Wilson refers to as Modernism’s

‘uncompleted’ project, exemplified by the work of architects such

as Hugo Haring and Hans Scharoun in Germany, and Alvar Aalto

in Finland.80 Aalto’s work in particular demonstrates an extensive

concern for architecture as a mediator of human sensory

experience.

78 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 138. 79 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language, Place, Milan : Skira Editore, 2000; Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture, Milan: New York: Electa; Rizzoli, 1985. 80 St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture.

Figure 24: Aalto,

Pedagogical

University, Jyvaskyla

(author’s photo)

The Lived Body 145

From the folding, turning circulation of the Library in Viipuri (1930-1935) to the open

hall of the Villa Mairea (1938-39), Aalto continually highlights the importance of human

movement. From the remarkable daylighting of the Library in Seinäjoki (1965) or the

Church in Imatra (1957-59) to the courtyard of the experimental house at Muuratsalo

(1953), his work emphasises architecture’s role as a mediator between inhabited space and

the natural environment, connecting the occupants to the landscape beyond. On the white

walls of the Paimio Sanatorium (1929-33), Aalto introduced a slight shadow of grey around

the handrails, to anticipate and counter the marks left by human hands. In his later work,

this awareness led to the use of large and heavy brass doorhandles, left to slowly tarnish

everywhere except where grasped by the hand, welcoming and recording human touch.

With the handrails of the Institute building of the Pedagogical University, Jyväskylä (1957),

Aalto extends the gesture to children, providing three different rails for them to grasp

depending on height.81 Through light and landscape, movement and materials, Aalto’s work

constantly reminds its inhabitants of the multiple dimensions of sensory experience.

The importance of multi-sensory

experience in architecture has also been

discussed by Juhani Pallasmaa.82 In

contrast to the classification of the five

senses, Pallasmaa invokes descriptions of

multiple and compound sensory modalities

through which the body engages with the

world. Vision and touch, for example,

combine in the haptic, an anticipation of

textural qualities through the reading of

surface. Haptic vision necessitates

shadow, that absence of light that

81 On the importance of the balustrade in Aalto’s work, see George Baird, Introduction, in Alvar Aalto, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. 82 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, London: Academy Editions, 1996. An earlier version of this essay was published as “An Architecture of the Seven Senses,” in Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, Tokyo: a+u publishing, 1994. pp. 27-37.

Figure 25: Aalto,

Pedagogical

University,

Jyvaskyla

(author’s photo)

The Lived Body 146

emphasises its movement among objects. By indicating those spaces and objects to which

light does not reach, shadows serve to stimulate the imagination, inviting the hands to explore

what the eye cannot see.83 Hearing also touches space by measuring it in relation to our

footsteps or voice, modifying the sounds of the body in accordance with its materials and

size. Through reverberation, sound creates the very experience of interiority.84 Spaces

amplify the voice, or urge its restraint, creating through scale the sense of intimacy or

intimidation.85 Space can also embrace silence, quietening the mind to create a sense of

tranquillity or eternity. Intimacy may also depend upon the warmth of a space, the smells it

contains, or the memories it evokes.86 Rich, well-worn, or polished surfaces may invite the

touch of a hand, or may even invoke the urge to place objects in the mouth and experience

their taste.87 A door handle polished by the hands of countless others invites us to share

their experience, to enter the space that has welcomed them.88 Thus sensory experience,

rather than leading to discrete readings of spatial information as sight, sound, smell, touch, or

taste, combine together to establish a multi-dimensional relationship between the body and

the space it occupies. Space is constantly measured in relation to the body, the body

measured in relation to space, with pleasure arising from a resonance between them.89

83 “Deep shadows and darkness are essential because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy.” Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 32. 84 “The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes a cavity sculpted directly in the interior of the mind.” Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 35. 85“Every building or space has its characteristic sound of intimacy or monumentality, invitation or rejection, hospitality or hostility. A space is conceived and appreciated through its echo as much as through its visual shape, but the acoustic percept usually remains an unconscious background experience.” Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 35. 86 “The most persistent memory of any space is often its odour.” Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 37; “The experience of home is essentially an experience of intimate warmth.” p. 41. See also Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979. 87“Deliciously coloured surfaces of stucco lustro and highly polished colour or wood surfaces frequently present themselves to the unconscious appreciation of the tongue.” Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 42. 88 “It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the hands of the thousands that have entered the door before us; the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome and hospitality. The doorhandle is the handshake of the building.” Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 40. 89 “We touch, listen, and measure the world with our entire bodily existence and the experiential world becomes organised and articulated around the centre of the body. […] We feel pleasure and protection when the body discovers its resonance in space.” Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, pp. 45-47.

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“Architectural experience” writes Pallasmaa, “brings the world into a most intimate contact

with the body.”90

Another application of phenomenological themes can

be found in the writings and work of Steven Holl. Holl

explicitly adopts themes from Merleau-Ponty, such as his

use of the title ‘Chiasma’ for his entry to the competition

for a new Museum of Contemporary Art for Helsinki,

held in 1992. His winning project, designed in

collaboration with Pallasmaa, opened in 1998. Called

‘Kiasma’ to suit the Finnish language, the Museum

contains 25 gallery spaces distributed over two main

volumes. One, a rectilinear form aligned with the main

city grid, is enveloped by a larger, curvilinear form to the

north and east, while between them is the main atrium

space that forms the entry to the Museum. The relation

between them forms the basis of the strategies of

‘crossing’ or ‘intertwining’ at the heart of the design.

In a preliminary sketch made by Holl during a visit to

the site, two entwined forms tie together a ‘line of

culture,’ extending to Aalto’s Finlandia Hall and Eliel

Saarinen’s National Museum, and a ‘line of nature,’

extending to Töölö Bay. On the same page, the forms

are described as an ‘art park’, a large, storage type

volume emphasised by a loading bay and freight elevator.

The two forms, rather than being simply twisted together,

are barely touching, like Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic

hands. Between them winds a complex circulation path,

following the curved wall of the atrium up into the

galleries, then folding back upon itself to follow the wall in

90 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 42.

Figure 27: Steven Holl, Kiasma

(author’s photo)

Figure 26: Steven Holl, Kiasma

(author’s photo)

The Lived Body 148

the opposite direction. Moving back and forth between the two volumes, the circulation cuts

across the long enfilades of galleries, enabling each to be entered in a slightly different way.

This movement combines with the variation in natural light admitted to each space to create

an eerie familiarity, as the body’s relation to each space is subtly shifted. Thus Holl deals

not with sensation as such, but with its liminality, capturing the ‘thickness’ of the body in the

threshold of its sensory adaptations.91 Also, with many of the galleries being similar size and

shape, the variations in circulation and lighting can be seen as kind of rehearsal of the way in

which multiple perspectives of the same object or space can be built up through movement.

To experience the one gallery type in many different ways demonstrates various possibilities

for the openings of a room, and consequently, for the movement of the body through it.

Taken together, these variations mimic the way the body might interrogate a space or form

by moving toward, around, or through it in multiple combinations. The variation between the

galleries gives rise to what might be perceived as a series of different experiences of the

same space, an enactment of tactile appropriation. Along with the emphasis on the liminality

of the senses, direction is focused toward the body, activating the strategies of reflexive

identification by which the body may know itself. The senses are turned inwards, effecting

the kind of ‘dehiscence’ described by Merleau-Ponty, the decentering of the concentric

circles of sentience and sensation. Within a simple pair of twisted forms, Holl has woven

paths of movement and light that serve to activate the perceptual mechanisms of the body,

emphasising their interaction with space.

An Inner Self

Derived from psychological studies of sensation, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology

demonstrates the role of the body in the constitution of experience, thereby challenging

Descartes’ conception of the self solely as a thinking being. With the Cogito, Descartes

91In Parallax, Holl identifies the importance of movement, the subtle shifts in position that give rise to the ‘overlapping perspectives’ necessary for the perception of form and space. “The movement of the body as it crosses through overlapping perspectives formed within spaces is the elemental connection between ourselves and architecture. […] Our faculty of judgement is incomplete without this experience of crossing through spaces, the turn and twist of the body engaging a long and then a short perspective, an up-and-down movement, an open-and-closed or dark-and-light rhythm of geometries—

The Lived Body 149

described a self that was largely independent of the body, a self whose very existence is

founded upon the operation of the mind. Merleau-Ponty’s work is but one of the many

reformulations of the sense of self originating in Descartes. Along with the epistemological

problems brought about by the dualism of mind and body, the separation of the thinking self

from the context of action has been the subject of rigorous investigation throughout the last

two centuries. Particularly in the fields of sociology and psychology, ideas of the self have

been reformulated to take into account the significance of social and political action, of the

engagement in work and the community, and of familial and religious affiliation. From Alexis

de Tocqueville’s study of American democracy92 to Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart,93

from Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man94 to Goffman95 and Giddens96, the modern self

has been endlessly dissected. Many of these analyses reiterate Max Weber’s

characterisation of the ‘disenchantment’ of self and world that arises from the rejection of a

theological world-view.97 In acknowledging the significance of ethical agency in the

constitution of selfhood, these studies suggest that experience necessarily takes into account

some conception of the experience of others with whom one shares the world. As Merleau-

Ponty suggests, the possibility that one’s own experience is of a similar kind to that of others

renders it an instance of an ‘anonymous existence’ of which one’s own body is merely a

part.98 Yet the existence of others does more than merely confirm one’s own experience of

the world. It also gives rise to the possibility of shared social experience, and of interpretive

practices through which common forms of meaning are established.

In terms of architectural representation, conceptions of the self as independent of the

body are problematic, though not entirely infeasible. It is still possible to manifest

representations of the self without the medium of the body, despite the profoundly physical

these are the core of the spatial score of architecture.” Steven Holl, Parallax, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000, p. 26. 92 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York: Knopf, 1953. 93 Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 94 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. 95 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. 96 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity, 1991. 97 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons, second edition, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976. 98 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 354.

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nature of architecture and its experience. Yet what is more problematic is the conception of

a self as a wholly interior thing, divorced from any shared or common context. It is not so

easy, as Descartes suggests, to feign that one has no body,99 when so much of the social is

determined by often tacit assumptions of gender, race, or norms of appearance and ability.

To address the role of the body in any social context it is necessary to go beyond matters of

the body in general to ask whose body, and to examine ways in which the bodies of others

differ from one’s own. Indeed much of the criticism of the Enlightenment conception of the

self centres upon the omission of difference from the constitution of the rational moral agent.

As we have seen, anthropomorphism often has a normative purpose, presenting a model of

ideal appearance, comportment, or behaviour, based upon the appearance of a ‘well-

composed’ body. This is part of what Karsten Harries describes as the ‘ethical’ function of

architecture: its role being to articulate a common ethos, that form of character, nature or

disposition that is shared by a community.100 Anthropomorphism is only one of the ways by

which architecture may fulfil this ‘function,’ but it appears to be an important one. As a

shared form of representation, architecture must confront the task of expressing common

forms of identity while acknowledging difference. Reference to human form enables it to

play out issues of the relation between individuals and the society to which they belong. In

doing so, it is able to address tensions that arise between the two, in oppositions of interior

and exterior, unity and fragmentation, surface and rupture, appearance and character, idea

and action. What is needed for this are models of human identity that acknowledge the

combined influence of internal and external conditions, in the ongoing negotiation between

individual and shared determinants of the self.

Unfortunately, the modern sense of self is determined primarily according to internal

standards of reason or preference independent of social context. According to Charles

Taylor, this problem originates in Descartes. In Sources of the Self, Taylor describes how

the modern sense of self results from an ‘inward’ turn, motivated by the desire to realise

99“[…] while I could feign that I had no body, that there was no world, and no place existed for me to be in, I could not feign that I was not; on the contrary, from the mere fact that I thought of doubting about other truths it evidently and certainly followed that I existed.” Descartes, Philosophical writings, p. 32. 100 Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, p. 4.

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ideas of the human good.101 Though developed from a tradition that reaches back to Plato,

Descartes’ formulation of the self solely as a thinking being constitutes a radical departure

from that tradition. With his profound mistrust of anything but his own cognitive faculties,

Descartes denies the possibility of knowledge as a correspondence with an external reality,

and instead measures it according to internal standards of certainty or clarity. For

Descartes, the power of thought is a capacity not to discern, but to construct an order of

reality in accordance with internal standards of reason.102 The rule of reason begins with

Plato, for whom self-mastery involved establishing the correct relation between parts of the

soul, with its higher forms (reason) needed to control its lower forms, passion and desire.

The purpose of such self-mastery, however, is that it enables access to the transcendent

order, to the order of the ‘good’ that lies beyond any individual conception of it. Reason,

for Plato, is not something that takes place within, but is a means to connect to the larger

order in which we participate.103 The inward turn in search of moral sources continued with

Augustine, who reinterpreted Platonic transcendentalism in light of Christian theology. For

Augustine, the soul takes on an interiority that contrasts with the exteriority of the body.

Although objects take their form through participation in divine Ideas, the soul within

presents itself as a surer path to knowing God than does the world of objects. God can

never be fully known, of course, but the path to knowledge lies in the ‘inner light’ of the

soul.104 The search for perfection is directed inward, since what is inside us is held to be

connected with a perfection that is ultimately beyond. As Taylor describes it, “God is to be

found in the intimacy of self-presence.”105

101 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 102Taylor writes: “The Cartesian option is to see rationality, or the power of thought, as a capacity we have to construct orders which meet the standards demanded by knowledge, or understanding, or certainty.” Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 147. 103 “Reason reaches its fulness in the vision of the larger order, which is also the vision of the Good. [...] Once reason is substantively defined, once a correct vision of the order is criterial to rationality, then our becoming rational ought not mo st perspicuously to be described as something that takes place in us, but rather better as our connecting up to the larger order in which we are placed.” Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 123. 104“[...] our principal route to God is not through the object domain but ‘in’ ourselves. This is because God is not just the transcendent object or not just the principle of order of the nearer objects which we strain to see. God is also and for us primarily the basic support and underlying principle of our knowing activity. So the light of God is not just ‘out there’, illuminating the order of being, as it is for Plato; it is also an ‘inner’ light. [...] It is the light in the soul.” Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 129. 105 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 134.

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Although continuing to regard the source of knowledge as within, Descartes does not

regard it as dependent upon a transcendent reality of Ideas. Thus the ontology of

knowledge is reversed, from an external reality to an internal representation. In this way, the

Cartesian mechanisation of the world can be interpreted as a negation of the world’s

participation in the manifestation of knowledge, a reduction of knowledge solely to an

attribute of the mind. As Taylor writes, “[...] the cosmos is no longer seen as the

embodiment of meaningful order which can define the good for us.”106 Instead, moral

sources must be found within, in the agent’s sense of dignity as a rational agent, their inner

control of reason over passion. Thus Cartesian metaphysics gave rise to a new

subjectivism, which placed inside the self what was previously located within both self and

world. As we have already seen, Descartes found no evidence of the mind within the

anatomised body, leading him to propose a location for it at a particular point (the pineal

gland).107 The mind or self is ‘inside’ the body, but not ‘within’ it, that is, it not co-extensive

with it such that the two are different dimensions of the same thing. Ideas are withdrawn

from the world, from their permeation of matter, to become the province of the mind. Thus

Ideas are also withdrawn from the body, separating it from the self. This new form of

inwardness is described by Taylor using the example of melancholy, the humour caused by

black bile. “Black bile produces melancholy feelings, because these manifest what it is, its

onto-logical status. The psychic is one of the media in which it manifests itself, if one likes,

but black bile is melancholy, and not just in virtue of a psycho-physical causal link.”108 The

modern duality of mind and body, of the mental and the physical, results from the inability to

conceive of this kind of ontology. Thus the Cartesian mind-body dualism transforms the

meaning of inwardness, from a permeation of the body by that which is also beyond it, to

merely being inside the body without substantive connection.

106 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 149. 107 “[…] the part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’s substance […].”Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, p. 352. Descartes suggested this idea in a letter to Meyssonnier in 1640, explaining that this gland was the only part of the brain he could find that was not double, and therefore ought to be the place where impressions from paired organs (eyes, ears) unite with each other before being considered by the soul. Rene Descartes, Philosophical Letters, translated and edited by Anthony Kenny, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. pp. 69-70. 108 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 189.

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Rather than being entirely dismissive of modern individualism, however, Taylor attempts

to find value within it, suggesting ways in which shared moral sources may be developed

from it.109 The advantage of modern individualism, argues Taylor, lies in the affirmation of

‘ordinary life,’ in which the creative capacity of the individual is able to be developed. This

originates in the rejection of elitist moral codes—most notably the honour ethic—in favour of

a Judeo-Christian spirituality emergent in the reformation. This largely Protestant tradition is

concerned with the maintenance of daily life, what Taylor describes as “[...] production and

reproduction, that is, labour, the making of things needed for life, and our life as sexual

beings, including marriage and the family.”110 The pursuit of excellence in this domain,

through self-exploration, personal commitment, and the development of self-responsible

freedom and dignity, is open to all. In fact the freedom to find personal expression in the

everyday has been one of the major gains of political reform in the modern era. Taylor

writes: “What I have been calling the affirmation of ordinary life is another massive feature of

the modern identity, and not only in its ‘bourgeois’ form: the main strands of revolutionary

thought have also exalted man as producer, one who finds his highest dignity in labour and

the transformation of nature in the service of life.”111 This idea, which found its most potent

expression in Marx, was fundamental to the reforms proposed by William Morris and the

Arts and Crafts movement, and can still be found today in the celebration of the ‘ordinary’ in

design.112

Practice and Narrative Identity

The sense of selfhood described by Taylor builds upon the phenomenological

conception of the body and its role in perception, knowledge, and identity. By stressing the

importance of ‘everyday activity,’ the making of things needed for life, Taylor emphasises

109 On ‘communitarian’ ethics, see also Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: a Defense of Pluralism and Equality, New York; Oxford: Basic Books; Martin Robertson, 1983; Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 110 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 211. 111 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 215. 112 N. J. Habraken, The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment, edited by Jonathan Teicher, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998; See also Deborah Berke and Steven Harris (eds.), Architecture of the Everyday, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997.

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the role of body not merely as sensory apparatus but as the focus of shared social practices.

These social practices allow the demands of the body, its need for food, shelter, or hygiene,

to be met in advance, in accordance with commonly established customs and traditions.

Indeed it is through the very notion of practice that what might be described as a

‘hermeneutical’ sense of self arises, acknowledging identity as a negotiation between internal

and external influences.113 In this way, the self is seen as constructed neither from within nor

without, but as emerging from the interpretive strategies by which each person relates to

their social situation. The idea of ‘practice’ extends the notion of ‘tacit’ or embodied

knowledge described by Michael Polanyi.114 Just as an individual can know more than they

are able to convey in language, so too what is known in this way is often tacitly shared or

transmitted. A similar phenomenon was identified by Marcel Mauss, noting how many

young French women had adopted a different gait after watching American cinema.115

Mauss’ ideas were later developed by Pierre Bourdieu, who used the notion of the habitus

in order to emphasise the habitual or assumed nature of social conduct.116 Habitus is a

form of practical belief, which takes the form of a ‘state of the body’ rather than a state of

mind.117 For Bourdieu, habitus mediates between the determinism of structures and the

vagaries of individual behaviour, thereby denying the split between objectivism and

subjectivism. This is because structures themselves are unable to determine practices unless

people behave in accordance with those structures.118 Through habitus, the body can be

seen as a site for the negotiation of personal and social determinants, where incorporation,

as “the internalization of externality,” meets objectification, “the externalization of

113 See Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. 114 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. The idea of knowledge beyond language was also identified by Jerome Bruner. See J. S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990; Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986; Beyond The Information Given; Studies in the Psychology of Knowing, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973. 115 Mauss, “Techniques of the Body.” 116 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977; see also Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge: Polity, 1990. 117 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 68. 118 Thus Bourdieu describes habitus as “[…] structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 72.

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internality.”119 Thus while practices are written or inscribed on the body, so too the body

is written or inscribed on the world.120

The role of practice in the constitution of identity is also addressed in the work of

Alasdair MacIntyre.121 Beyond the idea of practice as everyday action or activity,

MacIntyre invokes a specific meaning for practice that is fundamental to his characterisation

of virtue ethics. For MacIntyre, a practice is any cooperative form of human activity

involving the common pursuit of standards of excellence inherent to that activity. Examples

are fields of inquiry such as science or history, or arts such as painting, music, or

architecture; or says MacIntyre, politics in the Aristotelian sense, or the making and

sustaining of a family. Many of these practices are productive in that they involve the making

of goods which can be distributed either among the participants in the practice or to those

outside it. Goods produced in this manner may include food or shelter, knowledge or art.

Even those practices which result in no material good, especially games such as chess or

football, may be considered productive in that they improve the health, fitness, or skill of

participants, or in leading to fame or prestige. MacIntyre distinguishes between two

different types of goods; those ‘internal’ and those ‘external’ to a practice. External goods

are practice independent, and are generally those goods which are consumed in the

satisfaction of desire. Such goods must be possessed, which are then, by their nature,

precluded from being possessed by another. In contrast, ‘internal’ goods are the ideas and

works that participants create when attempting to progress toward and beyond the

standards of excellence by which a practice is defined. They are ‘goods’ because their

achievement transforms and enriches the practice in question, and they are ‘internal’ because

achieving them is a task available only to those whose participate in the practice. To

understand them requires at least some familiarity with the practice, its standards of

excellence, and its definitive works, and such understanding is fundamental to involvement in

the practice. Unlike external goods, internal goods are not consumed, but may be enjoyed

119 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 72 (original italics). 120 “[…] the body is thus constantly mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces, and this knowledge never has the objectivity it derives form the objectification in writing and the consequent freedom with respect to the body.” Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 73. 121 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, second edition, London: Duckworth, 1985. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, London: Duckworth, 1990, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth, 1988.

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by all those who participate in the practice. The distinction is fundamental to MacIntyre’s

definition of a practice:

“By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”122

For MacIntyre, the idea of a practice defined in this way is a necessary precondition for

his characterisation of virtue. Practices provide the social context for human activity,

providing standards that transcend the opinion of any single member. United by the

common pursuit of excellence, practitioners form a community. The community includes,

and is in part defined by, its previous practitioners, especially those whose achievements

help to define the practice. The community exists prior to any individual practitioner,

constituting an authority which they must confront, and from which they must learn.

Practices constitute an ongoing tradition, which must be acceded to by those who enter into

them, and which is continually transformed by the actions of its participants.123 According

to MacIntyre, to enter into a practice, to pursue, to achieve, and to extend its standards of

excellence, requires particular human traits known as virtues. Courage is needed in striving

to achieve the standards of excellence of a practice; humility, to acknowledge the authority

of the practice and its participants; honesty, to accept one’s own weaknesses in the face of

that authority; and justice, to recognise the rights and obligations of each participant.

According to MacIntyre, not to possess virtues such as these prevents the achievement of

internal goods and thereby renders the practice meaningless except as a means of producing

external goods.124 Virtue is dependent upon the context of a practice to establish the

relationship to others with whom are shared the same aims and standards of excellence.

Virtues are character traits definitive not of an individual but of their relationship to others

within a practice.

122 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 187. 123 See also Edward Shils, Tradition, London: Faber, 1981.

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MacIntyre’s account of the virtues is derived largely from that of Aristotle, as set out in

the Eudemian and Nicomachean ethics.125 The virtues are necessary in order to achieve

eudaimonia, loosely happiness or well being, the good of a life well lived. For Aristotle, the

good of life must be considered teleologically, that is, in relation to the end as an answer to

the question “‘What is the best kind of life for a human being like me to lead?’”126 Virtues

are those character traits necessary to achieve the end of a good of a life, and are also a

necessary part of that life. In contrast to the Enlightenment project of providing rational

justifications for questions of the good, the account of moral identity in terms of virtue

reinstates the social determinants of moral judgement, and rejects the possibility of moral

evaluations as mere expressions of personal preference. So, too, is rejected the prospect of

exercising judgement according to rational principles. Instead, the social or practical context

of action necessitates the key virtue of phronêsis, or practical wisdom, an ability to

determine the right course of action in a particular situation.127 Phronêsis is an intellectual

virtue that enables the virtues of character to be applied in context, such that the

contingencies of that context are related to broader notions of the good.

Architecture is readily interpreted as a ‘practice’ in the sense described by MacIntyre,

especially since he uses it as an example. It is a practical activity with internal standards of

excellence, developed and maintained over many centuries. It requires the application of

general principles to specific contexts, the outcome of which can not be predetermined.128

This requires skill in judgement, or practical wisdom (phronesis), not unlike that used in

legal practice.129 The idea of practice can also allow architecture to be seen as a search for

the good life, where a concern for the built environment can transform everyday activities

124 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 191. 125 Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, books I, II, and VIII, translated by Michael Woods, Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press, 1982; The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle, translated by Sir David Ross, London: Oxford University Press, 1969. 126 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 275. 127 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 154. 128 The role of phronesis or practical wisdom in the design of the built environment has been explored by Bent Flyvbjerg in his "Aristotle, Foucault and Progressive Phronesis: Outline of an applied ethics for sustainable development," Planning Theory 7-8 1992, pp. 65-83. 129 This analogy was noted and explored by Peter Collins, in Architectural Judgement, London: Faber and Faber, 1971.

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from the banal to the poetic, giving rise to a heightened sense of living in the world.130 In

this way, architecture can be seen not as the design of buildings per se, but as a means of

realising shared values about the inhabitation of space. In the present context, however,

what is significant for architecture is that within the notion of a practice is a conception of

identity dependent upon social context. In contrast to the interiority of the Enlightenment

rational agent, the identity of persons engaged in a practice emerges through their

engagement with others in pursuit of excellence. The standards of any practice are beyond

the determination of any individual practitioner, and are subject to transformation as part of

the ongoing tradition of that practice. Thus identity must be understood as being both

socially and temporally extended, emerging through the engagement with others over the

course of a life. Such identity, according to MacIntyre, must be determined narratively,

through interpretive strategies that tie events together into a meaningful whole.131

Considered teleologically, practices provide the context in which to view life as ordered to a

given end. Moreover, practices require action, and the identity of practitioners is

determined as much by the actions they take as by the conditions by which they find

themselves required to act. Through this narrative conception of self, identity is dependent

upon interpretations already in play, that is, upon the prejudices and preconditions occurring

within the context of action.132

The idea of ‘narrative identity’ has also been addressed by Paul Ricoeur.133 For

Ricoeur, identity emerges out of a reflexive interpretation, an understanding of oneself

through the ongoing process of describing the self to the self.134 Any conception of a

130 See Bill Hubbard, A Theory for Practice: Architecture in Three Discourses, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 88-97 and passim. 131 MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 204-221. 132 MacIntyre writes: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters–roles into which we have been drafted–and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed.” MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 216. 133 The idea of ‘narrative identity’ was first explored by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, 3 volumes: translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988, and later developed in Oneself as Another, Translated by Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. See also Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. 134“Our own existence cannot be separated from the account we can give of ourselves. It is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity. We recognize ourselves in the stories that we tell about ourselves.” Paul Ricoeur, “History as Narrative and Practice,” Philosophy Today, Fall, 1985, p.

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‘present’ self emerges from the narrative connecting past actions with future possibilities.

The perception of physical and temporal continuity results in an awareness of the

‘connectedness of life’ by which individual events are interpreted together.135 This

continuity is also reflected in the self as a permanence of character, that “[...] finite, unchosen

perspective through which we accede to values and the use of our powers.”136 Through this

continuity, the self emerges as the locus of both acquired identifications and habituated

actions, giving rise to lasting dispositions that are recognisable as character. Borrowing from

MacIntyre’s conception of practice, Ricoeur identifies the ‘twofold principle of

determination’ by which practices are transformed and practitioners develop narrative

identity. “Nothing”, he writes, “is more propitious for narrative configuration than this play

of double determination.”137 Practices reveal the shared nature of identity, the search for

excellence in a field of action where the actions of others are, of necessity, taken into

account.138 For Ricoeur, narrative strategies are not exclusively reflexive. They are also

amenable to eversion, allowing an identification with, and thus an ethical consideration of, the

other.

Institution, Memory, and Imagination

The many reactions against modernism in late twentieth century architecture have been

dominated by themes characteristic of this hermeneutical sense of self. Against the desire for

clarity has been an acknowledgment of ambiguity; against the elimination of ornament has

come an acknowledgment of architecture’s role as a manifestation of collective memory; and

against the rationality of function has come a renewed interest in architecture’s narrative

dimension. In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, demonstrating the multiple

readings to which architecture is amenable, Venturi shows how internal determinants, such

as structure and function, and external determinants, especially the relationship to the city,

214; as cited in Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, p 40. 135 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 115. 136 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 119. 137 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 158. 138 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 155.

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rarely find a pure and unambiguous resolution.139 The prospect of a correspondence

between interior and exterior, an idea reaching back to Viollet-le-Duc,140 is rejected by

Venturi. Instead he celebrates the role of architecture as the enclosure of space, separating

inside from outside in order to provide physical, as well as psychological, privacy.141 The

tension between contradictory forces does not, argues Venturi, obviate the possibility of

unity; rather it necessitates the demonstration of the tenuous nature of unity that arises when

contradictions are acknowledged rather than ignored.142

The differentiation of interior from exterior is particularly evident in the work of Louis

Kahn. In contrast to the modernist efforts to reduce the opacity of spatial boundaries, Kahn

regularly emphasised the thickness between internal and external surfaces. This thickness

enabled a more dramatic moderation of light to the interior, and also enabled Kahn to utilise

poché, servant spaces carved into the wall.143 Examples include the Trenton Bathhouse

(1955) and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1962-74).144 Kahn’s efforts

to define rather than dissolve interior space relate to his interest in architecture as a

manifestation of ‘institution.’145 For Kahn, ‘institutions’ such as schools, libraries,

laboratories, and gymnasia originate in the needs, shared by all human beings, to question, to

learn, and to live.146 Architecture begins with the making of a room, that “ […] world

139 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, p. 16. 140 “For if there is one thing worthy of the architects’ best consideration, it is the perfect agreement between all the parts of the building, that correspondence between the case and what it contains,—the frank expression outside of the arrangement within, not only in point of structure, but of ornamentation, which ought to be in close alliance with it.” Eugène-Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Discourses on Architecture, Grove Press, New York, 1959 (1889); as cited in Cornelius van de Ven, Space in Architecture: The evolution of a new idea in the theory and history of the modern movements, Third edition. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1987, p. 61. 141 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, p. 70. 142 “[…] an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole; its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity exclusion.” Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, p. 16. 143 On the origins of poché, see Michael Dennis, Court & Garden: from the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. 144 Klaus-Peter Gast, Louis I. Kahn: the Idea of Order, translated by Michael Robinson, Basel; Berlin; Boston: Birkhauser, 2001. 145 Alessandra Latour, (ed.) Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews, New York: Rizzoli, 1991. “I believe it is the duty of the architect to take every institution in the city and think of it as his work, that his work is to redefine the progress brought by these institutions.” p. 101. On ‘institution in Kahn, see also Romaldo Giurgola, Louis I. Kahn, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1989. 146“The measure of a city is its institutions.” Latour, Louis I. Kahn: Writings, pp. 281.

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within a world” that “offers [you] a measure of yourself.”147 Rooms enable different

activities that lie at the heart of institutions. A library, for example, begins when “A man with

a book goes to the light.”148 In the Phillips Exeter Academy Library (1965-71), this activity

becomes transformed into an arrangement between shelves, carrels, and external skin that

becomes the generator of the plan. In this way, the nature of the institution determines the

arrangement of rooms: “The plan is a society of rooms.”149 By providing a place for people

to meet, architecture mediates between individual and social needs.150 As the manifestation

of an institution, architecture becomes an expression of the convergence of individual and

social needs, an embodiment of their satisfaction in an idealised form.

In the work of Aldo Rossi, the narrative identity of a city and its inhabitants is

acknowledged through an exploration of architecture’s theatrical dimension. In projects

such as the Little Scientific Theatre (1978) and the Teatro del Mondo for the Venice

Biennale of 1980, architecture becomes the setting for the real and imagined activities of the

city.151 In his writings, Rossi emphasises the city as an artifact constructed by its inhabitants,

a manifestation of the collective lives of its citizens.152 The city is both an artifact and the

setting for its own making, at once demonstrating permanence and change as its elements

evolve. “Architecture,” writes Rossi, “attesting to the tastes and attitudes of generations, to

public events and private tragedies, to new and old facts, is the fixed stage for human events.

The collective and the private, society and the individual, balance and confront one another

in the city.”153 Moreover, as Graham Livesey identifies, architecture not only provides the

stage on which events of the city occur, it can also incorporate narrative structures,

physically embodying stories and invoking their recollection through memory and

147 Latour, Louis I. Kahn: Writings, pp. 263; 294. 148 Latour, Louis I. Kahn: Writings, p. 76. 149 Latour, Louis I. Kahn: Writings, p. 264. 150 “The city stems from the inspiration to meet. It is very important, there shall be places to meet, meeting is the most important part of a city plan.” Latour, Louis I. Kahn: Writings, p. 315. 151 See Dianne Ghirardo, “The Theatre of Shadows,” In Morris Adjmi (ed.) Aldo Rossi: Architecture, 1981-1991, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991, pp. 11-15. 152 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, translated by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982; Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, translated by Lawrence Venuti, Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, 1981. 153 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, p. 22.

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imagination.154 In this way, the ‘fleeting and contingent’ nature of human events becomes

connected to the ‘enduring and essential’ qualities of architecture. The city itself takes on

the characteristics of its inhabitants, in an idealised, abstracted, form. “With time,” writes

Rossi, “the city grows upon itself; it acquires a consciousness and memory.”155 The meeting

of past and present, of both individual and collective memory, occurs through the idea of

‘type.’ Types are both the elements of the city and the ingredients for its imaginative

reconstruction. Rossi’s architecture consists of endless combinations of primary elements,

abstracted into Platonic forms that provide idealised but recognisable images of the city.

Each of these elements embodies both an idea of itself, and a memory of its former use.

Types are important elements of the ‘analogous’ city, the counterpart of the real city that

occurs in memory and imagination.156 Columns, pediments, plazas, and towers are

combined in ways that inspire a dreamlike image of urban space. Sometimes, as with the

Elementary School in Fagnano Olona, (1972-1976) this image is taken directly from

Renaissance conception of the ideal city.

Types are the means by which narratives of human identity are given form and

permanence in architecture. They are thus an image of the body, presented, through

abstraction, in an idealised form. Types also serve to remind us of architecture’s civic

importance. Amenable to combination and invention, types enable the expression of

individuality, yet in their evocation of ideal forms, they present models of appropriate

appearance and bearing in the city. Through typology, architecture is able to acknowledge

the private whilst addressing its essentially public character. With both Rossi and Kahn, the

body reappears in architecture in an idealised form that lies at the heart of the city and its

institutions. Through the abstractions of type, the presence of the body is transformed into a

monument to the ideals of the city. As monument, the presence of the body reveals a city

formed not only through memory and imagination, but also from the pain and suffering of

those who built the city and its institutions. For Rossi, abstraction is most evident in the

architecture of commemoration and death, such as the haunting Cemetery of San Cataldo in

154 Graham Livesey, “Fictional Cities,” Chora 1, 1994, pp. 109-122. “Architecture is a vehicle for the unfolding of events; it represents a society’s efforts to make new stories and embody history.” p. 116. 155 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, p. 21. 156 Peter Eisenman, “The Houses of Memory: The Texts of Analogy,” in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982; pp. 3-11.

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Modena (1971). Memory is necessary ultimately to prevent pain and death from being

forgotten. It is this issue, of pain in the architectural body, to which we now turn.

Chapter 5 Monstrous Bodies: Architecture and the Play of Appearance

“Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self,

and includes the unity and integrity of the other.” Hans-Georg Gadamer1

Attempts to reintroduce the body into architecture addressed in the previous chapter

sought to counter the fragmenting tendency of modernity in a therapeutic manner, presenting

strategies of unification based upon the ‘lived body’ as a model of unity that includes the

mind, or self, or soul. However, much of the recent interest in the body in architecture

focuses instead on the impossibility of such a task. In the work of architects such as Coop

Himmelblau, Bernard Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind, representations of the body are used

to reveal the violence of modernity, to describe the damage and distortion, pain and suffering

inflicted upon the body through the imposition of order. The satisfaction of the needs of the

body through material wealth can be seen as a form of violence, deadening the sensuous

appreciation of the world and creating a condition of anxiety. With Marxist critiques in

particular, the provision of comfort can be viewed as a form of discipline, a scheme for

1 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 97.

Monstrous Bodies 165

social control in order to maximise the productivity of labour.2 This is exacerbated by the

‘alienation’ of the worker, their separation from the social context in which their products

are consumed. Along with these forms of violence, there is also the very literal forms of

violence to which workers were exposed as labour shifted from craft based production to

the operation of potentially dangerous machinery. When this potential was put to use in the

mechanisation of warfare during the twentieth century, the utopian vision of a world freed

from suffering by technology was severely challenged.3 This potential for violence presents

a view of objects beyond the notion that they merely extend or amplify the powers of the

body. Instead, it reveals how objects in turn act upon the body, disrupting its order through

the impact upon the senses. To understand how architecture might be influenced by this

‘disrupted’ body, it is necessary, firstly, to acknowledge the significance of pain in the

constitution of the body, and secondly, to explore the ways in which sensory experience,

including pain, can give rise to distortions of bodily order. In acknowledging the potential

for distortions or disruptions of bodily order, what emerges, in alternative to the static,

unified image of Vitruvian Man, is a monstrous or grotesque body, a body endlessly

becoming.

Pain and Pleasure: the Sublime

The feeling of pleasure that accompanies the experience of particular objects was first

described under the name of the ‘aesthetic’ by Alexander Baumgarten in the eighteenth

century.4 Later, Edmund Burke described how the experience of immense objects could

invoke a different emotion, a feeling of fear, followed by relief when it was recognised that

there was no reason to be afraid.5 This Burke described as the sublime. Since fear is an

apprehension of pain, it follows that pleasure and pain are not opposites, but are in fact

connected. The sublime may give rise to a feeling of pleasure that is manifest as admiration

2 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990; Chapter 8, “The Marxist Sublime.” 3 See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, Chapter 3, and passim; also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European cultural history, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 4 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1961 (1750). 5 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited by Adam Phillips, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 (1759).


or respect, while the elimination of pain or fear can give rise to a feeling of delight. The fear

invoked by such objects arises partly from the recognition that experiencing them is a task

that exceeds the senses. Burke described how in the experience of the sublime, the mind is

so occupied by its object that it cannot adequately reason about that object, resulting in

astonishment.6 Thus vastness or the infinite, magnificence or terror invoke the limitation of

the body and its senses in their presence. Burke also identifies a further connection between

pain and pleasure in relation to the effort needed to sustain life. He describes how the

labour necessary to avoid the weakening of the body through inactivity, while itself a form of

pain, results in the pleasure derived from self-preservation, with the result that pain can be a

cause of delight.7

Immanuel Kant’s consideration of the aesthetic relies heavily upon the ideas of

Baumgarten and Burke. For Kant, it was the immensity or danger of nature that was seen

to characterise the sublime, with mountains or an ocean storm able to invoke a feeling of

both enjoyment and terror.8 For Kant, the sublime invokes a combination of attraction and

repulsion, at once enticing the faculties and threatening to reveal their limits. In the

constitution of experience, described in the Critique of Pure Reason, the imagination must

first reproduce the variety of sensory experience so that it can be brought together under a

concept of understanding. With aesthetic experience, there is no a priori concept of

understanding to which the imagination must conform. The imagination, free to provide its

own concepts, is no longer subservient to understanding. Judgement is then reflective,

resulting in a harmony between imagination and understanding, described as ‘free play’ or

‘lively play’.9 This harmony gives rise to a ‘quickening’ of the faculties, and is experienced

as a feeling of pleasure. This is neither a sensate pleasure, nor a pleasure in the object being

judged. Rather, it is the pleasure taken in the act of judgement itself, in the feeling of the

suitability of the faculties for judgement and for cognition in general. The sublime, however,

invokes a feeling of ‘negative pleasure’ or ‘displeasure,’ arising from the ‘inadequacy of the

imagination.’10 The sublime, either in magnitude (the mathematically sublime) or might (the

6 Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 53. 7 Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 122-123. 8 Kant, Critique of Judgement, §28, p. 113. 9 Kant, Critique of Judgement, §9, p. 58. 10 Kant, Critique of Judgement, §23, p. 91.


dynamically sublime), is beyond human powers of understanding and mastery. The

prospect of pleasure or pain revealed in the sublime shows the reliance of consciousness on

corporeality, grounding cognition in the ‘feeling of life’ that results from the maintenance or

otherwise of the vital forces: “For, of itself alone, the mind is all life (the life-principle itself),

and hindrance or furtherance has to be sought outside it, and yet in the man himself,

consequently in the connexion with his body.”11

A Sociology of Artifacts

For Kant, the sublime is most easily found in the immensity of nature, although he does

acknowledge the “[…] bewilderment [which] seizes the visitor upon first entering St Peter’s

in Rome.”12 But by the twentieth century, it was products of industrial technology that

inspired awe and terror, with the Futurists, for example, describing a racing car as “ […]

more beautiful than the winged victory of Samothrace.”13 It particular, the technology used

to control and dominate nature provided the modern experience of the sublime. David Nye

argues that feats of engineering such as canals, railroads, bridges and dams used to

domesticate the American landscape usurped the wonder of nature, showing instead the

extraordinary capacity for human achievement.14 With later technological advances such as

atomic physics and space exploration, Nye shows how the sublime continues to be defined

by the frontiers or limits of the exploration of the natural world. The making of artifacts on a

scale that challenges the natural sublime can be seen as an extreme version of the use of

tools to extend the powers of the body. Nietzsche described this continual desire to exert

control over nature under the ‘will to power.’15 Yet as a form of extension of the body,

such artifacts can also be understood through Burke’s idea of labour and its relation to the

connection between pain and pleasure in the sublime. The sustained or focussed effort

involved in the making of artifacts is endured not merely in order to meet the immediate

11 Kant, Critique of Judgement, §29, p. 131. 12 Kant, Critique of Judgement, §26, p. 100. 13 Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, p. 103. 14 David Nye, American Technological Sublime, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. See also Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral ideal in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. 15 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968.


needs of the body, but in order to counter the terror of the sublime, through which the

limited powers of the body are made ‘painfully’ apparent.

The idea of labour as a means to overcome suffering is also evident in the writings of

Karl Marx. For Marx, bodily labour was the foundation of culture, with society seen to

result not from ideology (as did Hegel), but from the control of labour and resources in

material production. In Capital, Marx describes the shift to mechanised production in terms

of its disruption to the relation between objects and the body.16 With craft production, both

tools and the artifacts that they are used to produce are an extension of the body, which can

then be used in a meaningful manner. But with the shift to factory production, the body of

the worker becomes a mere ‘appendage’ to the machine, reversing the prosthetic

relationship.17 Moreover, the worker is rewarded not through the reciprocation of the made

object or another of equal worth, but only in an amount necessary to reproduce their own

labour. Artifacts then enter circulation as commodities, with the choice among them

motivated by desire. Eventually, commodities become fetishised, charged with a sexual

energy through advertising, promising to make up for the suffering caused by alienation.18

Freud also described the way objects can compensate for deficiencies, being ‘prosthetic’ in

the sense of making up for bodily damage or deficiency.19 In a similar way, objects can also

be used to make up for the sense of absence or loss occasioned by desire. Freud makes

frequent reference to the body as a lack, with compensation for the loss of a parent or

companion often sought in objects, or acts of making such as writing.20

Through a consideration of pain, labour, and desire in the relation between objects and

the body, anthropomorphism can be seen as more than merely an ascription of human form

to objects. In an article titled “Where are the Missing Masses?” Bruno Latour describes the

way in which labour can be ‘delegated’ to objects.21 In this article, Latour develops the

16 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, introduced by Ernest Mandel; translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 17 Marx, Capital, p. 548. 18 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, p. 79; see also Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds). Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. 19 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by Joan Riviere, edited by James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1963. 20 See also Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, p. 77. 21 Bruno Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Wiebe Bijker and John Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical


idea of anthropomorphism in the context of his wider study of the sociology of knowledge,

examining the way in which science comes to be adapted in society, especially in the form of

technology.22 Latour’s work can be seen to form part of the recent interest in the social

significance of technology, addressed by authors such as Jacques Ellul,23 Albert

Borgmann,24 and Don Ihde25, including the reading of technological systems as ‘socially

constructed,’ led by John Law.26

Latour’s description of objects as embodied labour begins with the hinge, which, he

explains, enables a door to temporarily convert an impenetrable barrier (wall) into a

penetrable one, thus enabling people to pass through. The hinge is an artifact that obviates

labour, in this case, the labour of breaking a hole in the wall in order to create an opening,

and then rebuilding it in order to restore the wall as barrier.27 The hinge enables the opening

to be returned to its position as a wall, itself obviating the labour of policing the boundary.28

The ability to assign work to an artifact Latour describes as an act of “displacement or

translation or delegation or shifting,” and the objects to which that work is delegated as

‘nonhuman.’29 Such artifacts are ‘anthropomorphic,’ firstly, because they are made by

humans, and secondly, because they perform work that would otherwise need to be done

Change, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 225-258. See also Bruno Latour, “Technology is Society Made Durable,” in John Law (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, London; New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 103-131. 22 His works include The Pasteurization of France, translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Harvard University Press. 1988; Aramis, or The Love of Technology, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996; We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993; and Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 23 Ellul, The Technological Society. 24 Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 25 Don Ihde, Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction, New York: Paragon, 1993. 26 See Wiebe Bijker and John Law, (eds.) Shaping Technology/Building Society: studies in sociotechnical change, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1992; also Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, (eds.) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. 27 “[…] instead of driving a hole through walls with a sledgehammer or a pick, you simply gently push the door […]; once you have passed through the door you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed; you simply push the door gently back.” Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?” pp. 227-228. 28 “If you do not want to imagine people destroying walls and rebuilding them every time they wish to leave or enter a building, then imagine the work that would have to be done to keep inside or outside all the things and people that, left to themselves, would go the wrong way.” Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?” p. 228.


by a human. Rarely, however, do such objects perform their delegated task entirely

independently. The labour, instead of being completely eliminated, is instead reduced; a

major effort is ‘transformed’ into a minor one. In the case given, the task of breaking open

and rebuilding the wall is reduced to the simple act of opening and closing the door. The

task having been delegated can then be forgotten, except in as much as it gives rise to

another task. Having people perform this task, however, requires that they be disciplined,

that is, that they be familiar with what is required of them, and behave accordingly. Thus

artifacts are ‘anthropomorphic,’ thirdly, because of the way they shape human behaviour.

That discipline, however, is not always successful; doors are left open. One option is to

delegate that task to another ‘nonhuman,’ in this case a door closer or ‘groom.’30 This also

determines the behaviour of its users, in this case demanding some effort in order to open

the door.31 While such artifacts may appear impartial, the need to exert effort in fact

discriminates against some users.32 The behaviour that ‘nonhumans’ impose upon their

users Latour describes as ‘prescription,’ which gives to mechanisms their moral and ethical

dimension: “We have been able to delegate to nonhumans not only force as we have known

it for centuries, but also values, duties, and ethics. […] The sum of morality does not only

remain stable but increases enormously with the population of nonhumans.”33

This can be seen through the use of doors as a means of exclusion, with the task of

making judgements about who is to enter transferred from the figure of the guard to the

artifacts of locks and keys, or other security devices.34 As a technology of social order, the

door provides a way of controlling admission to the spatial hierarchies afforded by walls. In

this way, they can be seen as a manifestation of ideology, determining an acceptable balance

29 Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?” p. 229. 30 “‘groom’ is a French trademark that is now part of the common language.” Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?”p. 231. 31 Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?” p. 232. 32 Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?” pp. 232-234. 33 Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses?” p. 232. 34 Neil Leach cites Kafka’s “Before the Law,” a short story in which an unopened door provides an allegory for the denial of justice, as illustrative of practices of exclusion. Leach writes: “The opening of the door reveals the wall as a wall, just as, in illuminating the limit, transgression exposes the limit as limit. The door provides the key for understanding the whole question of limit and transgression, of openness and exclusion.” Leach, Rethinking Architecture, pp. xix-xx.


between privacy and social interaction.35 In Latour’s reading, the use of a door closer

embodies an ideal of equality, allowing anybody to enter, although the practice of

establishing statistical norms or standards for anthropometrics works against those who fall

in the outer percentiles.36 Even when inclusion is guaranteed, as with ‘automatic’ doors, this

is invariably achieved through the consumption of fossil fuels, the most frequently used form

of ‘nonhuman’ energy. In that case, the delegation effects a demarcation between humans

and nature, with human labour reduced at environmental expense.

The Body in Pain

The relationship of labour to the sensations of pain and pleasure also forms the subject

of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain.37 Echoing Burke’s description of labour as pain

endured in the pursuit of self-preservation, Scarry describes artifacts as a ‘projection’ of the

body out into the world, which are made in anticipation of their ‘reciprocation’ back upon

the body.38 Typically, such artifacts show an excess of reciprocation, with the contribution

to the preservation and maintenance of the body being greater than the effort expended in

making them. Thus artifacts act as a ‘lever,’ serving to amplify the relation between

projection and reciprocation, in turn reducing the need to constantly attend to the

maintenance of the body. By overcoming the unmediated impact of the world upon the

body, artifacts enable attention to be focused outward, away from the body. Moreover,

since the effect of such objects is cumulative, attention can be focused at ever increasing

distances.39

35 See also Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors, and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 55-92; Robin Evans, “The Rites of Retreat and the Rites of Exclusion: Notes towards the Definition of Wall,” In Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 34-53; and Robin Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space,” Architectural Association Quarterly, 10/1, 1978, pp. 24-35. 36 See the discussion of ‘normality’ in chapter 3, based upon Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance. 37 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 38 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 307-326. 39 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 38-39.


Projection begins as objects replicate or enhance the functions of bodily parts; tools

extend the hand, telescopes the eye, telephone the ear and voice.40 Artifacts may also

extend bodily capacities or needs, with modes of recording (writing, photography) acting as

externalised memory, vehicles replicating the capacity for movement, other artifacts acting to

externalise thought, labour, spirit, or desire.41 Finally, artifacts can be seen as a projection

not of any particular bodily part or capacity, but of sentience itself, the feeling of ‘aliveness’

that characterises embodied experience.42 The shift of projection from bodily parts, to

bodily capacities, to sentience in general represents a progressively more internalised

conception of the body, a movement deeper toward the interior of felt experience. In the

making of artifacts that acknowledge or anticipate the needs of the body, the projection of

sentience is achieved through the acknowledgment of the potential aversiveness of

sentience. That is, artifacts are a manifestation of the notion “perceived-pain-wished-

gone.”43 Sentience, in the form of pain, is projected outward from the body, into artifacts

that contain within themselves a sympathy toward human suffering, manifest as a capacity to

prevent pain. In the making of artifacts, the world is ‘remade,’ deprived of its immunity or

indifference to the problems of sentience.44 In exchange, the body absorbs some of the

“blissful immunity” of inanimate objects, becoming (if temporarily) released from the burden

of pain.45 Echoing Husserl’s description of the ‘radical discontinuity’ between self and

world that occurs at the surface of the body, Scarry describes this exchange as a ‘turning

inside-out’ of the body, a reversal of its internal and external surfaces resulting from acts of

making. She writes:

40Parts that may be extended prosthetically also include legs, skin, heart, lungs, brain, womb, and phallus. Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 281-283. 41 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 283-284. 42 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 281. 43 “The shape of the chair is not the shape of the skeleton, the shape of body weight, nor even the shape of pain-perceived, but the shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 289-290. 44 “[…] it is part of the work of creating to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate–of, in other words, its privilege of being irresponsible to its sentient inhabitants on the basis that it is itself nonsentient.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 285. 45 “[…] by transporting the external object world into the sentient interior, that interior gains some small share of the blissful immunity of inert, inanimate, objecthood; and conversely, by transporting pain out onto the external world, that external environment is deprived of its immunity to, unmindfulness of, and indifference toward the problems of sentience.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 285.


“The interchange of inside and outside surfaces requires not the literal reversal of bodily linings but the making of what is originally interior and private into something exterior and sharable, and, conversely, the reabsorption of what is now exterior and sharable into the intimate recesses of individual consciousness.”46

The projection of interior states outward into the world of objects, and the reabsorption

of exterior states back into the body, emphasises the ‘radical discontinuity’ that occurs at the

surface of the body by acting to overcome it. The ‘turning inside-out’ of the body through

the making of artifacts reduces the experience of embodiment as pure interiority, bringing

about a disembodiment. Through their cumulative effects, objects divert attention away

from the body, as well as diverting attention away from their own essence as the

embodiment of sentience.47 Moreover, the cumulative nature of artifacts continually

recreates the body, diverting attention away from the body qua body, bringing it to presence

in its recreated form, and thereby inspiring yet further acts of projection.48 Scarry’s concept

of the ‘turning inside-out’ of the body reveals its surface as a point of inflection, across

which the complexity and extent of acts of projection mirror the complexity and depth of

sentience. The further these move outward, away from the surface of the body, the less

evident is the central role of the body in acts of making.49 When the body does become an

object of attention, it is often a result of a breakdown or disruption of the function of objects

intended to reduce the aversiveness of sentience, giving rise to an experience of frustration,

or even pain. This can happen in several ways.

Firstly, an object by its failure or absence may give rise to precisely the kind of pain that

it was intended to prevent. Through malfunction, the normally unproblematic relation

between body and object breaks down, undergoing what Leder describes as ‘dys-

appearance.’50 In Heidegger’s terms, the object demonstrates “a certain un-readiness-to-

hand,” being unusable because it is damaged, or missing, or because its use is precluded by

the demands of another activity. For Heidegger, an object may demonstrate an ‘un-

46 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 284. 47 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 325. 48 “Through objects, human makers recreate themselves, and now this newly recreated self finds that it is no longer expressed in the existing object world, and thus goes on to project and objectify its new self in new objects (which will in turn recreate the maker, and so again necessitate new forms of objectification).” Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 320. 49 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 325. 50 Leder, The Absent Body, Chapter 3, p. 69.


readiness-to-hand’ by being conspicuous (present-to-hand but not useable), obtrusive

(being present-to-hand when what is needed is absent) or obstinate (by ‘standing in the

way’ of our concern).51 (Latour’s study of anthropomorphism referred to above began with

such an instance, as he noticed a sign on the door of La Halle aux Cuirs at La Villette in

Paris: “The Groom Is On Strike, For God’s Sake, Keep The Door Closed.”52)

Secondly, an object by breakdown or accident may inflict pain, upon its user, or upon

an unwitting or innocent passer-by. As Scarry suggests, this is an ‘aberrant’ condition in the

relation between body and object, one that may become the subject of litigation. Such

cases attempt to discover how such a situation arose in the first place, why those who both

made and used the object did not anticipate its failure, and why they did not act to prevent

it.53 From the compensation for those injured in the workplace, to the apportionment of

blame in product liability trials, such inquiries also try to establish how the damage might be

counteracted or reversed, and who should be responsible for such an undertaking. In such

cases, Scarry explains, there are “only two real subjects, the nature of the human body and

the nature of artifice, the ease with which ‘hurting’ occurs and the responsibility with which

‘making’ must therefore occur.”54

Finally, the very nature of artifacts as a means to reduce the aversiveness of sentience

can be fundamentally inverted with the intentional infliction of pain upon the body in acts of

torture and war. In the transformation from tool to weapon, an artifact that is an extension

of one body out into the world is used to counteract the extensions of another, to delimit the

attentions of the other inward towards the body. What differentiates ‘tool’ from ‘weapon’

writes Scarry, is not the object itself, but the surface on which it falls.55 To intentionally

damage or destroy artifacts made to extend the body, to intentionally damage or destroy the

body itself, constitutes an act so antithetical to projection that Scarry describes it as

‘unmaking’. Through inflicting pain, the outward focus of attention is prevented by making

the interior of the body so pervasive, so compelling in the aversiveness of sensation, that no

51 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 102-104. 52 Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses,” p. 245. 53 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 296-297. 54 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 301. 55 “What we call a weapon when it acts on a sentient surface we call a ‘tool’ when it acts on a nonsentient surface.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 173.


other thought is possible. The intentional infliction of pain Scarry regards as an act of such

insensitivity to the problems of sentience that it can only be described as stupidity.56

The Architecture of Violence

Ideas of pain and violence provided a common theme for architects of the late twentieth

century. Peter Eisenman’s early work highlighted the omission of the body in modernism by

interpreting architecture as a form of Chomskian semiotics, testing its ability to form ‘well-

formed-forms’ by challenging the anthropomorphic origins of function.57 In Bernard

Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts, images of cinematic violence are appropriated and used

to generate architectural form, based upon narratives of violence and death.58 Tschumi even

makes the preposterous claim that “To really appreciate architecture you may even need to

commit a murder.”59 Architects Coop Himmelblau also invoke fictional violence in their

celebration of the aesthetics of the architecture of death, calling for an architecture that

‘bleeds,’ ‘burns,’ ‘blazes,’ and ‘dies.’60 In a less frivolous gesture, Daniel Libeskind

(whose writing machines are reminiscent of the one described by Kafka in “The Penal

Colony”) derives the form of his Jewish Museum in Berlin from a mapping of the histories of

Holocaust victims.61

Several recent commentaries, focussing upon the work of these architects, have

attempted to place their use of the body within the context of the history of

anthropomorphism in architecture. Foremost among these is Anthony Vidler, who

addresses the significance for architecture of the body’s capacity for sensation, and the close

proximity of pleasure and pain. In “The Building in Pain,”62 Vidler suggest that the renewed

56 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 278. 57 Peter Eisenman, House X, New York: Rizzoli, 1982; Peter Eisenman, Houses of Cards, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 58 Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts, second edition, London: Academy Editions, 1994. 59 Bernard Tschumi, Bernard Tschumi: Architectural Manifestoes, London: Architectural Association, 1979, unpag. As cited in Michael J. Ostwald and R. John Moore, Disjecta Membra: Architecture and the Loss of the Body, Sydney: Archadia, 1998, p. 15. 60 Coop Himmelblau (Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky), Coop Himmelblau: Die Faszination der Stadt/The Power of the City, edited by Oliver Gruenberg, Robert Hahn, and Doris Knecht Austria, George Büchner 1988. 61 Daniel Libeskind, Countersign, London: Academy Editions, 1991. 62 Anthony Vidler, “The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture,” AA Files 19 (Spring 1990): pp. 3-10. With revisions, the article was later included as a chapter in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.


interest in corporeal metaphors shown by architects in recent years is based upon a body

radically different to that of humanism. Instead, he writes, “It is a body which seems to be

fragmented, if not contorted, deliberately torn apart and mutilated almost beyond

recognition.”63 Vidler argues that the architecture of Coop Himmelblau, Tschumi, and

Libeskind results from the subjection of the centering, stabilising, bodies of humanism and

modernism to various forms of violence. For Vidler, a new conception of the body

emerges, one which constitutes a radical departure from theories of architecture that

“pretend to accommodation and domestic harmony.” By bringing into question the unity and

integrity of the body, attacking the boundaries by which its identity has been secured, a new,

‘post-humanist’ body is revealed.64

According to Vidler, the violence enacted against the body attempts to avoid the

simplicity of post-modernism as either a return to or inversion of historical sources. Instead,

he argues, the fragmented body represents the culmination of an historical process whereby

the metaphorical connection between body and building is gradually severed. Based upon

Scarry’s concept of projection as moving from parts, to capacities, to sentience, Vidler

describes the anthropomorphic relation between body and building as progressing through

three stages. The first sees a literal relationship of “building as body”: the second sees the

building as epitomising “states of mind based on bodily sensation”; while the third sees “the

environment as a whole endowed with bodily, or at least, organic characteristics.”65 Vidler

relates these stages to the historical development of anthropomorphism, suggesting that the

history of architecture has been characterised by an increasing abstraction of the body. He

writes:

“The history of the body in architecture, from Vitruvius to the present, might in one sense be described as a progressive distancing of the body from the building, a gradual extension of the anthropomorphic analogy into wider and wider

63 Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” p. 3. 64 “Its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to the recognizably human, but embrace all of human existence, from the embryonic to the monstrous; its power no longer lies in the model of unity, but in the intimation of the fragmentary, the morsellated, the broken.” Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” p. 3. 65 Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” pp 3-4.


domains, leading insensibly but inexorably to the final ‘loss’ of the body as an authoritative foundation for architecture.”66

Vidler identifies the first, literal stage of projection (‘building as body’) with the classical

tradition, the almost literal use of the body firstly by Vitruvius, and later by Alberti,

Francesco di Giorgio, and Filarete. The emergence of the modern period, and the interest in

the ability to evoke emotions of terror and fear suggested by Burke’s aesthetics of the

sublime, is then associated with the second stage, the objectification of physical and mental

states. Described by the then emergent field of psychology as ‘projection,’ the ability of

artifacts to reflect our interior states was first applied to architecture by Heinrich Wölfflin.

“‘We always,” wrote Wölfflin, “project a corporeal state conforming to our own; we

interpret the whole outside world according to the expressive system with which we have

become familiar through our own bodies.’”67 According to Vidler, architects eager to

represent the vitality of the new, healthy body and mind of modernism capitalised upon the

abstraction of the body into its affective states.68 The emergence of the third, ‘animistic’,

stage, Vidler associates with the modernists’ desire to recreate the whole environment,

thereby projecting ‘aliveness’ onto the world of objects. This, he suggests, has continued

throughout the twentieth century.

It is in the transition from the corporeal to the psychological, Vidler argues, that the

Freudian sense of ‘lack’ or ‘loss’ becomes evident, resulting from “the move away from the

archaic, almost tactile, projection of the body in all its biological force.”69 This loss of the

unified body, and the resultant fragmentation, arises from the emphasis upon temporal and

sensory experiences of the Romantic sublime. From this sense of loss, Vidler develops his

theory of the ‘unhomely’ (or ‘unheimlich’), later elaborated in The Architectural

Uncanny.70 Referring to Lacan’s essay on “The Mirror Stage,” Vidler explains how the

‘morsellated’ or fragmented body is suppressed when an externalised image of the body is

66 Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” pp. 3-4. 67 Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture” cited in Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” p. 5. 68 Citing Geoffrey Scott: “‘The centre of that architecture was the human body; its method, to transcribe in stone the body’s favourable states; and the moods of the spirit took visible shape along its borders, power and laughter, strength and terror and calm.’” Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” p. 4. 69 Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” p. 7.


available. The mirror performs an orthopaedic function, providing a sense of totality in lieu

of the fragmentary nature of bodily experience. Yet in the shift toward identification with the

image, the morsellated body becomes repressed to the unconscious. Events which cause

the morsellated body to be experienced invoke a feeling of the ‘uncanny’ described by

Freud, the strangely familiar sense of revisiting that which is presumed lost. Such experience

is brought about by the distortion of conventions of bodily movement and enclosure, through

which the body is ‘placed in question.’ The discomfiting of the body is further emphasised

by the resistance to the domestic aspects of architecturethe homelyin Himmelblau’s

work. Deliberately eschewing the provision of comfort, such architecture acts as a critique

of modernism by denying the utopian ideal. Modernity’s therapeutic inscription of a ‘new

body’ is overturned in favour of a decentred, destabilised body. Vidler observes that such

distortions of bodily convention constitute a form of violence against the body of the user.71

Vidler’s adoption of the threefold characterisation of making described by Scarry

suggests that the alleviation of pain occurs through increasing abstraction of the body.

Architecture replicates the body firstly as protection or enclosure, secondly in its capacity

for dwelling, and thirdly as a representation of projection itself.72 In contrast, the infliction of

pain can take on an increasing precision, from the destruction of artifacts made to represent

70 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. 71 He writes: “Confronting the architecture of Himmelblau, or, less dramatically, of Tschumi, the owner of a conventional body is undeniably threatened, as the reciprocal distortions and absences which are felt in response to the reflected projection of bodily empathy operate almost viscerally on the body. We are contorted, racked, cut, wounded, dissected and intestinally revealed, impaled and immolated; we are suspended in a state of vertigo, or thrust into a confusion between belief and perception.” Vidler, “The Building in Pain,” p. 7. 72 “In normal contexts, the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body, its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world, yet in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move out into the world and allows that world to enter. But while the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturization of the world, of civilization. Although its walls, for example, mimic the body’s attempt to secure for the individual a stable internal space–stabilizing the temperature so the body spends less time in this act; stabilizing the nearness of others so that the body can suspend its rigid and watchful postures; acting in these and other ways like the body so that the body can act less like a wall–the walls are also, throughout all this, independent objects, objects which stand apart from and free of the body, objects which realize the human being’s impulse to project himself out into a space beyond the boundaries of the body in acts of making, either physical or verbal, that once multiplied, collected, and shared are called civilization.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 38-39.


the body to the direct destruction of the body in torture and war.73 As Scarry identifies, the

use of domestic objects and spaces to inflict pain marks torture as directly antithetical to the

kindness of accommodation.74 Yet there is also that form of ‘violence’ caused by an excess

of comfort leading to the loss of bodily sensation. This is the violence against which

architects like Coop-Himmelblau can be seen to react. Theirs is a violence against violence,

an attempt to reawaken the senses anaesthetised by the comforts of modernity. Although

this takes the form of violence against the body, it is in fact aimed at the body as manifest in

previous representations. The violence of suppression or control associated with forms of

bodily representation is resisted with violence that aims to disrupt those forms.75

From Tradition to Revolution

These anthropomorphic readings reveal architecture as both a means to avoid pain and a

representation of pain as an interior state. It begins with the imagination, as pain is

remembered or anticipated, and therefore prevented. For Scarry, pain and imagination are

each others missing intentional counterpart: the experience of pain prompts the imagining of a

state in which that pain is absent. Through work, the imagination moves from a wholly

internal state to being projected into the world, made manifest in the form of an object.

What can be imagined will always greatly exceed what can be made, but once made, an

object is able to continually perform its task of reducing pain, which in turn frees the

imagination to focus upon other objects. Moreover, objects, and the labour of producing

them, can be shared.76 Through accumulation, the collective work of many people made

manifest as artifacts can exceed the imagination of any one person.77 However, shared

73 Jean-Paul Sartre: “My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body in so far as the house was already an indication of my body.” Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, London: Routledge, 1998 (1958), p. 325. 74 “The domestic act of protecting becomes an act of hurting and in hurting, the object becomes what it is not, an expression of individual contraction, of the retreat into the most self-absorbed and self-experiencing of human feelings, when it is the very essence of these objects to express the most expansive potential of the human being, his ability to project himself out of his private, isolating needs into a concrete, objectified, and therefore sharable world.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 41. 75 Ostwald and Moore, for example, describe Vitruvian Man as the target of post-humanist violence. See Disjecta Membra, passim. 76 This Scarry describes as the “collective work of artifice.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 171. 77 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 171-172.


labour depends firstly upon a shared imagination, a distillation of the imaginings of many

down to that which can be imagined in common. When unable to be shared, products of

the imagination are deemed fantasy or madness; when easily transformed into common

projects, they are regarded as practical or sensible. The relation between imagination and

sensation therefore depends on those practices by which ideas are transformed into artifacts.

This collective effort of dealing with the needs of the body can bring people together,

united in the pursuit of common goals and interests. Working from Scarry’s injunction

against the infliction of pain, Richard Rorty claims that solidarity can result simply from the

recognition that “cruelty is the worst thing we can do.”78 He argues that in spite of the

‘contingencies’ of language, self, and community identified by European philosophers in the

nineteenth century, there is still the possibility, indeed the necessity, of working together to

avoid pain and suffering. Similarities arising from our vulnerability to pain and humiliation are

enough to outweigh differences of race, religion, or custom.79 Similarly, Alfonso Lingis

argues that the capacity for suffering binds together all people into a community, even those

who have nothing in common.80

Yet in the dialectic of ‘making and unmaking,’ Scarry also alerts us to a dimension of

ethics beyond the injunction against cruelty. As independent objects, the action of artifacts

as a ‘lever’ is not tied to any particular body, but can be shared. When shared, the balance

between ‘reciprocation’ and ‘projection’ is transformed into the socio-political question of

how each person’s benefit is measured against their contribution. One political ideology

may focus upon the ‘site of projection,’ protecting each person’s right to choose the manner

of their participation in collective effort, while another may focus upon the ‘site of

reciprocation,’ protecting each person’s right to benefit from that collective effort.81 That is,

the question of ‘rights’ tends to focus upon either the distribution of labour, or the

distribution of the advantage arising from that labour. Moreover, the question of solidarity is

usually defined by the boundary between those included in a particular system of shared

78 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 85, and passim. 79 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 192. 80 Alfonso Lingis, The Community of Those who have Nothing in Common, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. 81 The first she associates with the political ideology of the United States; the second with that of the Soviet Union. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 309.


effort and gain and those who are excluded, between those who would together alleviate

suffering and those who threaten to cause it.

With the ‘communitarian’ critique of liberalism, the issue of ‘rights’ to effort or reward is

rejected in favour of questions of justice, which depends upon an equitable balance

between the two. Its proponents, including Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, build

upon the notion of ‘distributive’ justice developed by Michael Walzer.82 With MacIntyre’s

virtue ethics, the relation between effort and reward is mediated by the social context of

production, the common pursuit of excellence within a practice.83 The ability to achieve

excellence is what determines distribution of ‘external’ goods, the material benefit gained

from the production of artifacts. But for MacIntyre, the ability of artifacts to satisfy wants or

needs is secondary to their ability to make manifest the human capacity to achieve

excellence. In relation to Scarry’s characterisation of the shift in projection from bodily

parts, to capacities, to sentience itself, the importance of ‘internal’ over ‘external’ goods in

MacIntyre’s work also reflects the social context of acts of making. By moving beyond the

requirements of the body, the pursuit of excellence in the production of artifacts transforms

them into an ever deeper representation of the human capacity for projection. The more a

particular good transcends the satisfaction of need, the more it is able to represent

projection itself, the more widely it can be shared among those within a practice as an

‘internal’ good. Artifacts made according to the standards of excellence of a practice do

not merely represent the particular instance in which they satisfy bodily need, but begin to

represent the entire social tradition in which such a need has been identified, interpreted, and

overcome. In this way, ‘solidarity’ is that which arises between members of a community as

they share the benefits of each other’s labour, made manifest as common meaning rather

than simply as material reward.

Within a community, the viability of imagined artifacts is measured firstly against the

collective experience of it members, in relation to the tradition in which similar artifacts have

been previously made. Yet that tradition also brings with it forms of representation

82 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: a Defense of Pluralism and Equality, New York; Oxford: Basic Books; Martin Robertson, 1983; On communitarianism, see also Sandel’s, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which addresses the deficiencies of liberalism through a direct critique of the work of John Rawls. 83 MacIntyre, After Virtue.


developed by previous participants. Each tradition must evolve, as its modes of

representation describe its current participants as well as its former ones. The task of

imagining artifacts, like that of producing them, must be shared. Questions of distributive

justice in relation to the sharing of labour and its benefits can therefore be extended to the

way in which imagination is shared, the way in which participants take part in the ‘making-

up’ of artifacts to be made through common effort. Those who feel themselves inadequately

represented may resort to violence against inherited forms. As Georges Bataille identifies,

common modes of representation are often the target of revolutionary violence. Although

commonality is often achieved through the use of idealised forms, those ideals invariably

reflect hierarchies of power. He writes:

“Architecture is the expression of the very being of societies, in the same way that the human physiognomy is the expression of the being of individuals. However, it is more to the physiognomies of official characters (prelates, magistrates, admirals) that this comparison must be referred.”84

Idealised forms, instead of representing people in general, become an expression of

authority, which instead of speaking for a people, can impose silence upon them. Perceived

as a form of violence, the imposition of idealised forms can be responded to with the

violence of revolution. Thus Bataille continues:

“It is obvious, actually, that monuments inspire socially acceptable behaviour, and often a very real fear. The storming of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of affairs: it is difficult to explain this impulse of the mob other than by the animosity the people hold against the monuments which are their true masters.”85

Instead of representing an official ideal, through already extant externalised processes and

forms, it is possible to seek alternative forms, forms that more closely represent the current

participants of a tradition. Not yet externalised, these forms must be found within, in

‘interior’ states, “[…] psychological processes that are most incompatible with social

84 Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” translated by Paul Hegarty, in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 21. 85 Georges Bataille, “Architecture.”


stability.”86 Since in architecture this may constitute a reaction against the forms of the

body, these forms of violence may gives rise to what Bataille describes as a ‘bestial

monstrousness’.87

Monstrous Bodies

Like the sublime, the monstrous contests the limits of the body. The monstrous or

grotesque body originates in the fear of disruption to the unity of the body through

fragmentation or multiplicity, of the ‘many in the one.’88 It challenges both natural and

geometric order, and arouses feelings of disgust. As described by Mikhail Bakhtin, the

monstrous or grotesque body is not static, but is ever in the act of becoming, active in its

exchange with the world. The grotesque body emphasises not the smooth, impenetrable

surfaces of the body, but the ‘orifices and convexities’ where exchange occurs, and which

lead into the depths of the body.89 Thus monsters which inhabit the surface of architecture,

as ornamentation in the form of gargoyles, are also an expression of depth. This is evident in

the myths of origin retold by Ruskin, indicating an excess of pleasure, or an outpouring of an

uncontrolled imagination.90

Marco Frascari’s interpretation of the body in architecture brings together Bakhtin’s

idea of the monstrous with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the ‘chiasm’ to explore the role of the

senses in the productive power of the imagination. To begin, Frascari laments the almost

complete loss of the body in architectural practice. In a consideration of the drawings of

86 Georges Bataille, “Architecture.” 87 “Men seem to represent only an intermediary stage in the morphological process that goes from apes to great edifices. Forms have become ever more static, ever more dominant. Moreover, the human order is bound up from the start with the architectural order, which is nothing but a development of the former, such that if you attack architecture, whose monumental productions are now the true masters all across the land, gathering the servile multitudes in their shadow, enforcing admiration and astonishment, order and constraint, you are in some ways attacking man. A whole worldly activity, without doubt the most brilliant in the intellectual order, currently tends in this direction, denouncing the inadequacy of human predominance: thus, strange though it may seem, when it is a question of a creature as elegant as the human being, a way opens […] towards a bestial monstrousness; as if there were no other possibility for escape from the architectural galley.”Georges Bataille, “Architecture” p. 21. 88 See Mark Dorrian, “On the Monstrous and the Grotesque,” in Word and Image, 16/3, July/Sept 2000, pp. 310-17. “Monstrous and grotesque figures are generated by operations upon the periphery of the body, undoing its coherence and thereby its separation from other bodies and from the world.” p. 313. 89 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968, pp. 317-318. 90 Paulette Singley, “Devouring Architecture: Ruskin’s Insatiable Grotesque,” in Assemblage 32, April 1997, pp. 110-125.


Carlo Scarpa,91 Frascari differentiates between various modes by which reference to the

body is included in built form. In Scarpa’s drawings for the Brion Cemetery, Frascari

identifies a series of small circles at head height, used to represent the head. With these, he

argues, attention is directed to movement through the space, via a kind of ‘self-caricature.’

The effect is metonymic, rather than metaphoric, with the head alluding to a series of

experiences that have been anticipated by Scarpa, who has imaginatively placed himself in

the work. This metonymy differs from the predominant role of the human figure within

contemporary architectural drawings, whose presence is necessitated by the lack of any

human reference in the architecture itself. This, argues Frascari, was not always the case:

“In older representations, the scale relation between drawing and building itself was

mediated by a design method in which the human figure was incorporated into the elements

of architecture by simile and metaphor, by an organic use of stone and rendering.” He

continues: “The goal was the transubstantiation of architectural artifact into human presence,

and vice versa; it was understood as a productive system that operated simultaneously on

two levels, the rhetorical and the physical one. The world constructed by this twofold

process of view thus became experience translated into a visual and tactile manifestation of

thinking.” 92

Although Scarpa’s metonymic representation differs from the figural use of the body,

what is still evident is the inter-relation of the rhetorical and the physical, the translation of

experience into artifact. The nature of that translation is further explored in articles which

address fundamental domestic spaces, namely, the bathroom and kitchen. In “The

Pneumatic Bathroom,”93 Frascari laments the reduction of bathing to a matter of hydraulic

efficiency, the loss of water’s sacred status. He argues that the bathroom, as the last

remaining place where the sacred and the profane meet, is the ideal place for restoring

architecture to its role in fostering happiness, the ‘beatific’ life. In water is present pneuma

or spiritus that can make dwellings ‘numinous’ places, places that are “inhabited by a

91 Marco Frascari, “The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa,” RES 14, Autumn 1987, pp. 123-142. 92 Frascari, “The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa,” p. 123. 93 Marco Frascari, “The Pneumatic Bathroom,” In Nadir Lahiji and D. S. Friedman (eds.) Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, pp. 162-180.


human or spirit that elicits in most of us the reaction of awe or memory.”94 Water’s role in

activating the senses elicits memory, which in turn gives access to the imagination. This not

the Kantian imagination, relating experience to a concept of understanding, but is that

described by Giambattista Vico, founded upon a theory of the image.95 Frascari writes:

“For Vico, the pneuma is a sacred odor of memory. Smell, the strongest sense of memory, is the key to the door of the mundus imaginalis. From this point of view, bathrooms are the modern locus of the odor of sanctity, an aroma for mental sanity, pneumatic iconostases, the current golden gates to a beatific life.”96

The importance of the senses is also addressed in Frascari’s consideration of

architecture and gastronomy.97 Critical of the ‘nefarious puritan ideology’ of the modern

movement, he argues instead for reconsideration of the sensory dimension of knowledge.

“Contemporary architecture is almost entirely tasteless,” he writes, its concern for visual

processes of signification obviating the tactile pleasures that are significant for judgement.

The sensory origins of taste, as a mode of discernment of edibles, became transformed into

the judgement of all types of intellectual and aesthetic works. Because incorporative, taste is

reliant upon internalised modes of evaluation, such as sensitivity and intuition. In contrast to

reductive procedures of rational judgement, taste involves a productive search for

correspondences between things, whether flavours or architectural artifacts. Taste, writes

Frascari, is thus a tactile procedure of sign production and interpretation, evident in the

seventeenth-century notion of ‘productive taste’: “Productive taste is a form of knowledge

which results from the chiasmatic relationship between knowledge which takes pleasure and

pleasure which knows.”98

94 Frascari, “The Pneumatic Bathroom,” p. 177. 95 Donald Philip Verene, Vico, Science of Imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. 96 Frascari, “The Pneumatic Bathroom,” p. 172. 97 Frascari, “Taste in Architecture,” pp. 2-7. See also See also Frascari, “Take as Much You Please of Some Unknown Material,” and Frascari, “Architects, Never Eat Your Pasta Without a Proper Sauce! A short anti-Cartesian meditation on the nature of architectural imagination.” 98 Frascari, “Taste in Architecture,” p. 4.


Frascari compares productive taste with a particular mode of reasoning described by the

American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce.99 To the modes of deduction

and induction already described by logicians at the time, Pierce added a third mode, which

he called abduction. The three modes relate to the inference of the unknown component in

the relationship rule-case-result. Deductive reasoning involves the generation of a result

from the application of a known rule to a particular case. This is the simplest mode, a

calculation requiring no further inference. Inductive reasoning involves the inference of a

rule from the known or measured results of one or more cases; this is the mode at work in

the discovery of mathematical or scientific rules. Here judgement (or method!) is required to

establish what constitutes a valid combination of cases and results, as is an element of

conjectural reasoning in order to establish possible rules that can then be subjected to

scrutiny (refutation, in Karl Popper’s terminology). Pierce’s third mode, abductive

reasoning, involves the generation of a case to which will apply various rules and from which

will arise particular results. Here results are desired, not known, and judgement is necessary

to mediate the conflicting or incommensurable influence of many rules. As Frascari explains,

“abduction is a highly productive procedure. New understandings are continually

generated.” Moreover, abduction “is a power concerned with the reality of external objects

and not with the ideal picture.”100

Dealing with the reality of objects is necessitated by the reality of the body, since it is in

order to satisfy the needs of the body that ‘useful’ arts of gastronomy and architecture are

developed. Through abduction, material reality is transformed into artifacts which best meet

the body’s need for food or shelter. Abduction is practical, that is, it arises in the context of

a ‘practice,’ the productive response to needs where the outcome is not yet known.

Frascari writes: “Abduction helps to produce within practice, since it is an inference based

on the sign interpreted by the ‘labile body’ in search of taste (sapor), or pleasure in

discerning, that is sapienza.”101 The relation of taste to knowledge makes spaces for the

preparation and consumption of food the phenomenological core of architecture.

99 A consideration of Pierce’s work in relation to architectural design can also be found in Lionel March, “The Logic of Design and the Question of Value,” In Lionel March, (ed.) The Architecture of Form, Cambridge, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1976. 100 Frascari, “Taste in Architecture,” p. 7. 101 Frascari, “Taste in Architecture,” p. 7.


The Sensory Imagination

Abduction as a productive mode of reasoning within practical contexts relies upon the

activation of memory or imagination, and once again the senses provide the key. Through

the synaesthetic nature of experience, taste and smell give access to a mental glossary of

images wherein new ‘cases,’ new realities, can be formed. In contrast to the reductive

nature of deductive or inductive thought, which give rise to the ‘intelligible universals’ of

Cartesian rationality, Frascari invokes Vico’s theory of ‘imaginative universals.’ In his New

Science, Vico raised the possibility of generating philosophical understanding not from

rational categories but from the image.102 Vico argues for the power of the image to

represent theoretical knowledge without abstracting it from its practical context. Thus

Frascari argues for a ‘theory of the image,’ in which the practical is no longer regarded as an

a-theoretical condition. Instead the theory of image acknowledges the unity of instrumental

and symbolic representations: “As in the hermetic visual tradition, this theory of image holds

that images not only represent but capture something of, or participate in the nature of, what

is represented.”103

The communicative nature of images is especially evident in the frontispieces of

Renaissance architectural treatises. Frontispieces present an allegorical image that provides

a key to reading the text within, presenting a summary of the proposed rules of composition

and proportion. Also included are characters whose appearance explain or justify the

architecture in social or ethical terms. As Frascari explains, “the frontispieces [develop] a

dialogue between the bodies of the personifications and the body of the architectural

construction.”104 This dialogue is critical for grounding the treatise in a framework of virtue.

Through mythical symbolism, the architecture is described in human terms, establishing a

proper relation between appearance and character. The practical is given theoretical

justification, or more accurately, the good is made manifest in objects, thus connecting the

worldly and the spiritual.

102 Marco Frascari, “Maidens ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’ at the Sides of Lady Architecture.” Assemblage 7, 1988, pp. 14-27. See also Verene, Vico, Science of Imagination. 103 Frascari, “Maidens ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’,” p. 18. 104 Frascari, “Maidens ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’,” p. 19.


Into the Labyrinth

The theory of images also acknowledges a network of possible associations that are

denied by analytic methods. Unlike rational taxonomies, where connections are severed in

order to classify in accordance with pre-determined categories, images allow multiple

connections through various forms of association and analogy.105 This network of

associations Frascari describes as a labyrinth, where any point can potentially be

connected with any other.106 Labyrinthine thought acknowledges a complexity of meaning

that can only be reached through multiple associations and interpretational possibilities. It

acknowledges the productive potential of indirection, disorientation, and serendipity. In the

labyrinth can be found monsters, the outcome of ‘inconceivable unions.’107 Architecture,

as the search for unknown outcomes, involves an engagement with the monstrous.

Architectural drawings, then, are a ‘demonstration,’ rendering conceivable that which was

inconceivable:

“‘Monster’ is a derivation of the Latin verb monstrare, to show or point out, which in itself derives from the verb moneo, to make think. In other words, these monsters show how to bring together a constructing with a construing, through a demonstration, rather than through a preposterous prescription, i.e., design and construction drawings based on merely graphic conventions. [Monsters] demonstrate the possibility of union between different kind of realities. They are not abnormalities but rather extraordinary phenomena that indicate the way for architecture, a way by which designs and drawings are not separate entities but symbols.”108

Since a symbol is both the thing itself and its meaning, the forging of connections

between previously unrelated elements involves the joining together of objects and ideas.

The rendering conceivable of inconceivable unions relies upon a demonstration of their

connection. In architecture, this occurs in the details, which, Frascari explains, are the

105 See also Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 106 Marco Frascari, “A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration,” JAE 44/1, November 1990, pp. 11-19. 107 Frascari, “The Ideas of Demonstration,” p. 13. 108 Frascari, “The Ideas of Demonstration,” pp. 13-14.


medium of both understanding and making; a “chiasma of construing and constructing.”109

This concept, set out in “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,”110 appears throughout Frascari’s work.

The idea of detail as the unit of both construction and signification gives rise to an ‘object-

hermeneutics,’ in which the body is the means of interpretation of architecture. The chiasm

of construal and construction gives new meaning to the idea of technology in architecture.

Frascari argues that technology’s instrumental focus, as logos of technè (construction),

ignores its semiotic significance, the possibility of a technè of logos (construal). Technology

is therefore seen to have a “double-faced role […] which unifies the tangible and the

intangible of architecture.”111

Theories of composition in architecture, especially those based upon Aristotle’s theory

of unity from the Poetics, establish a relation of part to whole that enable a work of

architecture to be understood. As with a text, interpretation relies upon a symbiotic

emergence of meaning, where the order of the whole is imposed upon that of the parts, and

the order of the parts in turn affects that of the whole. This order is traditionally imposed

upon architecture through ideas of geometry and proportion, which establish a ‘proper’

relation of part to whole. This relationship enables meaning to be derived from the

necessarily partial acts of engagement as the body moves through a building. Citing Walter

Benjamin, Frascari refers to the appropriation of architecture through touch, ‘by habit and

often in a state of distraction.’112 He writes:

“In architecture, feeling a handrail, walking up steps or between walls, turning a corner, and noting the sitting of a beam in a wall, are coordinated elements of visual and tactile sensations. The location of those details give birth to the conventions that tie a meaning to a perception. The conception of the architectural space achieved in this way is the result of the association of the visual images of details, gained through the phenomenon of indirect vision, with the geometrical propositions embodied in forms, dimensions, and location, developed by touching and by walking through buildings.”113

109 Frascari, “The Ideas of Demonstration,” p. 13. 110 Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” Via 7, 1984, pp. 23-37. 111 Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” p. 23. 112 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 113 Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” p. 28.


Because of the body’s role in the perception of architecture, the chiasma of construal

and construction engenders a chiasma of body and building. The hermeneutic duality of

interpretation, where the interpretation of any text involves the reader in self-interpretation,

becomes somatic; the body is understood in and through the building. Like Lacan’s mirror,

the building becomes a way to unify the fragmentary nature of experience, as the architecture

provides clues for the relation of part (detail) to whole. As each detail has meaning in

relation to the whole, so too the act of engaging with it relates individual sensations to a

unified sense of embodiment. In Monsters of Architecture, Frascari describes this chiasma

of interpretation as a ‘radical anthropomorphism.’ He writes:

“Just as we think architecture with our bodies, we think our bodies through architecture. The rhetoric embodied in the above sentence displays a monstrous chiasm that implies a radical anthropomorphism in the concerns of architectural representation. This anthropomorphism can be understood as the ascription of human characteristics and attributes to buildings and edifices and it has long been a part of architectural theory.”114

A dialectic arises from the chiasmic exchange between buildings and bodies, in which the

partial unity of the body can be understood. Architecture is able to represent the body as a

destabilised entity, in a process of continual becoming. Frascari is critical of current

architectural practice for failing to maintain the ongoing task of representing the body in this

manner. “Architects can no longer do without the identification of the human body and its

elements in the architectural body.”115 This identification requires more than the literal

representation of bodily images. Instead, it requires bodily and corporeal tropes through

which the ‘essence’ of architecture is revealed.116 Citing Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the

visible and the invisible, Frascari describes architecture as a making evident of the body’s

unseen dimension, a perspicuous representation of the body as lived. “The role of the

architect is to make visible that which is invisible.”117 The key to these tropes lies in the

recognition of the ‘monstrous’ nature of the lived body. Through fantasy or the imagination,

inconceivable unions are generated from known images. Derived through transformations

114 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 1. 115 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 4. 116 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 1. 117 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 4.


and combinations, these unions result in the generation of new forms; “this is a production of

monsters.”118 The lived body comes to understand the world not by merely incorporating

things into itself, but by making things out of itself and transforming itself into them.119 The

monstrous is encountered at the boundaries of the known; as Frascari explains, monsters

were used in medieval Psalters to define the limits of the known, appearing both at the edges

of maps and in the margins of texts. “There they transcend the text, first, by making the

relationship between the part and the whole an enigma, and second, by placing events within

our vision that are capable of putting our thought out of place, of determining a buried but

real possibility of meaning.”120 In the same way, architecture defines boundaries. By

defining and delimiting the actions or activities of the lived body in space, architecture defines

the place of the body and thereby signifies the limits of the body in an unlimited world:

“The signs of the built environment substantiate the human ekstasis, which is done by providing events in edifices; the taking place of events and the putting out of place of events generates a building. The edges of walls, the capitals, the keystones, and all the possible architectural elements that express the nature of constructional joints are the places that articulate these monstrous events. These events/joints are architectural monsters that make people think about their environment. […] Architecture is the monstrous frame of the ‘depiction’ of life.”121

As an outward extension of the boundaries of the body, both as object and event,

architecture is able to represent the body as a destabilised unity. Conversely, the work of

architecture that represents the body in this way is itself incomplete, awaiting the habitation

of its occupants, the lived experience of its spaces and details. Thus unity emerges neither in

body nor building, but through their interaction. The limits or boundaries of each are

constantly negotiated through the interplay of expression and experience. Both body and

building are always in a process of becoming, awaiting completion from one other. The

body of architecture is the grotesque body described by Bakhtin, a body that redefines the

notion of the whole. Frascari writes:

118 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 46. 119 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, pp. 49-50. 120 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 16.


“At the basis of the grotesque imagery is a special concept of the body as a whole and of the limits of this whole. In grotesque architecture, the limina between bodies and buildings differ sharply from the neoclassical models as well as from the naturalistic picture of the human body. The grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, continually created; and it is the principle of others’ bodies. The logic of a grotesque image ignores the smooth and impenetrable surface of the neoclassical bodies, and magnifies only excrescences and orifices, which lead into the bodies’ depths. The outward and inward details are merged. Moreover the grotesque body swallows and is swallowed by the world. This takes place in the openings and the boundaries, and the beginning and end are closely linked and interwoven.”122

The Play of Imagination

The idea of the monstrous can be seen to arise as the demonstration of new

combinations challenges the limits of understanding. Monsters arise in the interplay between

the known and the unknown, in the play of limits that challenges the bounds of reason. As a

demonstration, the monstrous can be seen to emerge from the play of mimesis in art. As

well as being a source of fear like that of the sublime, monsters are ludicrous, an absurdity

that results from the ‘ludic,’ from play that is prior to reason.123 In western metaphysics, art

has long been considered a form of play, and the aesthetic turn in Germany in the eighteenth

century can be seen as attempt to bring art and play under the control of reason. Kant, for

example, posits the threefold source of subjective knowledge–intuitive apprehension,

imaginative reproduction, and conceptual recognition–as a necessary means of overcoming

the mere ‘play of appearances.’124 Without being reproduced in the imagination, the play of

appearances remains empty, and prevents the senses from being a source of knowledge.125

But later, in the Critique of Judgement, ‘play’ is used to describe the relation between the

faculties of imagination and understanding in aesthetic experience, their relation reversed due

to the lack of an a priori concept. This reversal is brought about by the different kind of

judgement that characterises aesthetics. “Judgement,” says Kant, “is the faculty of thinking

121 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, pp. 16-17. 122 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, p. 32. 123 Dorrian, “On the Monstrous and the Grotesque,” p. 315. 124 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St Martins Press, 1965, p. 133 (A101).


the particular as contained under the universal.”126 Where the universal is given, as is the

case in the comprehension of nature, judgement is determinant. But for aesthetic

judgement, no universal is available, and must be provided. The imagination, free to provide

its own concepts, is no longer subservient to the understanding. The harmony reached

between the two when the concept is provided by the imagination is referred to as ‘free

play’ or ‘lively play’. This harmony gives rise to a ‘quickening’ of the faculties, a feeling of

pleasure in the act of judgement, in the suitability of the faculties for judgement and cognition.

Play, like art, is pleasurable because of its disinterestedness, its ‘purposiveness without

purpose,’ enjoyed for its own sake rather than for the sake of cognition.127

In this way, the arbitrary play of sensory experience is transformed into an orderly play

between imagination and understanding.128 Play is brought under the service of reason in its

enculturated forms. This is especially so as the wild play of Nature (evident in the sublime)

is transformed, through mimesis, into the play of art.129 Following Kant, Friedrich Schiller

redeemed play from its association with frivolity, raising it to a state of seriousness identified

as the very being of man.130 For Nietzsche, however, the possibility of bringing play under

the domain of reason was rejected. Instead, he identified play with forces prior to reason,

the archaic forces, described by the Pre-Socratics, of a world in eternal conflict. The ‘will

to power’ is a form of such prerational play, a violent, arbitrary, and ecstatic play of forces,

beyond good and evil, through which worlds are created and destroyed.131 The dramatic

consequences of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ are tempered by Heidegger, who describes the

play of physical forces or ‘world-play’ (Welt-Spiel) as a ‘play of Being’ that takes the form

125 See also Mihai Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 35. 126 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Introduction, IV. 127 In the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful,’ Kant describes four ‘moments’ of the judgement of taste, according to the categories of quality, quantity, relation, and modality. The first moment is the experience of the beautiful with disinterested pleasure. The second is where the object deemed to be beautiful is claimed to be universally so. The third moment is the recognition of finality (purposiveness) without purpose. And the fourth is the claim that the pleasure is free from concepts. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Analytic of the Beautiful. 128 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, p. 40. 129 Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 45. 130 “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly man when he is playing.” Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters, translated by Reginald Snell, New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1965, p. 80. 131 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, pp. 67-99.


of human being.132 The resultant shift of ontological primacy reveals man as both player

and plaything, a participant in and consequence of the play of Being. Eugen Fink reiterated

the ontological shift by identifying the way that players lose themselves in the world of

play.133

The primacy of play is also emphasised by Johan Huizinga’s description of the human

capacity for play (as Homo Ludens) as more fundamental than those of thought (Homo

Sapiens) or making (Homo Faber).134 Responding to Huizinga, Roger Caillois developed

a typology of play within which the various games of any culture could be understood.135

Caillois describes four types of play: competition (‘agôn’), chance (‘alea’), simulation

(‘mimicry’), and vertigo (‘ilinx’). Each of these reveals a bodily dimension of play, a

testing of limits against others or the world. In competitive games, players test their skills

against one another, in abstracted forms of the original conflict of battle. Games of chance,

through the simple addition of a wager, transform random or unpredictable events into a test

of fate, where the player risks loss in exchange for the possibility of gain. With games of

vertigo (such as mountain climbing) the limits of the body are tested against the forces and

resistances of the world, in an active confrontation with the sublime: giving rise to what

Caillois describes as ‘pleasurable torture’ or ‘voluptuous panic.’136 Pleasure and pain are

combined as the body is literally thrown around by the forces of nature, extending sensory

experience while risking harm or death. With simulation, finally, the limits of the body are

tested in their credibility, that is, against the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ of an

audience.137 This is a play of appearances, originally manifest in the ‘presentation’ of gods

in rituals and festivals, a ‘mimetic monstration’ achieved through the use of costume and

132 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, pp. 99-124. 133 Eugen Fink, “The Ontology of Play,” in E. Gerber and W. Morgan (eds,), Sport and the Body: A Philosophical Symposium, second edition, Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1979, p. 79. 134 Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, translated by R.F.C. Hull, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. 135 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, translated by Meyer Barash, New York: Free Press, 1961. 136 “The last kind of game includes those which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.” Caillois, Man, Play and Games, p. 23. 137 “Mimicry is incessant invention. The rule of the game is unique: it consists in the actor’s fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell, the spectator must lend himself to the illusion without first challenging the décor, mask, or artifice which for a given time he is asked to believe in as more real than reality itself.” Caillois, Man, Play and Games, p. 23.


mask.138 With simulation, the body as an expression of the character within is transformed

into the expression of another through the adjustment of voice, gesture, or appearance. In

each kind of play, the engagement of the player means that there is a potential for gain, or

for loss; of status, wealth, life, or meaning. Thus play constitutes an active engagement with

the world, where the body is put at risk, inviting both pleasure and pain in one and the same

gesture.

Play as Festival and Symbol

The idea of play, especially as performance or festival, is also important for Gadamer’s

explication of hermeneutics. Critical of the natural sciences for providing only a limited

notion of understanding, Gadamer turns instead to art, using it to illustrate modes of

knowledge characteristic of human sciences such as philosophy, theology, and history. The

experience of art, according to Gadamer, requires an active engagement between the viewer

and the work, giving rise to forms of truth beyond those permitted by scientific method. He

writes: “[…] the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that

changes the person who experiences it.”139 The truth available to us through hermeneutic

experience is a truth ‘in which one must try to share.”140 To explain the active engagement

between subject and object in the experience of art, Gadamer refers to the ‘to-and-fro’

movement characteristic of play.141 Play is not something performed by a subject with a

particular goal in mind, which, when reached, brings the play to an end. For play to ‘fulfil its

purpose,’ a player must become ‘lost’ in the play.142 Becoming lost in play is an

engagement that effects a shift in ontological primacy, where the player as subject is given

over to the play itself.143 Play depends not upon the subject who plays it, but on ‘the

138 See Michael Echeruo, “Redefining the Ludic: Mimesis, Expression, and the Festival Mode,” in Ronald Bogue and Mihai Spariosu (eds.) The Play of Self, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 137-156. 139 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 102. 140 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. xxiii. 141 Gadamer,Truth and Method, Part I, Section II, ‘The Ontology of the Work of Art and its Hermeneutic Significance.” 142 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 102. 143 “[…] play is not to be understood as something a person does. As far as language is concerned, the actual subject of play is obviously not the subjectivity of an individual who, among other activities, also plays but is instead the play itself.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 104.


movement as such.’144 Once begun, the movement maintains itself; the player, drawn into

the play, needs neither will nor effort to sustain it.145 Play has its own momentum, which is

maintained by the player merely by responding to the play in the required manner. If the

player fails to respond, the play stops. Through its momentum, play exacts from the player

actions or decisions in order that it be maintained. During play, the openness of possibility is

transformed into the necessity of commitment. To give oneself over to the play, to invite the

shift in ontological primacy, is, for Gadamer, a ‘risk’ for the player, which constitutes the

very attraction of play.146 He writes: “[…] all playing is a being played. The attraction of a

game, the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters the

players.”147

By surrendering to the play, the player forgoes the differentiation from nature that arises

from their status as rational beings, and instead becomes part of the ‘natural’ movement

evident in the play of light, or the play of forces, or the play of animals. According to

Gadamer, this play of nature exhibits a “phenomenon of excess.”148 Having no purpose or

end outside of itself, play merely ‘presents itself’; its meaning is ‘pure self-presentation.’149

Gadamer writes: “The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches

presentation (Darstellung) through the players.”150 Art, as representation, is that form of

play which makes a game of presentation.151 Moreover, through the work of art, the self-

presentation of play can be re-presented for another. Play has a directedness, such that its

144 “The movement backward and forward is obviously so central to the definition of play that it makes no difference who or what performs this movement. The movement of play as such is, as it were, no substrate. It is the game that is played–it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The play is the occurrence of the movement as such.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 103. 145 “Play clearly represents an order in which the to-and-for motion of play follows of itself, it is part of play that the movement is not only without goal or purpose but without effort. It happens, as it were, by itself. […] the structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 105. 146 “[…] the game itself is a risk for the player. […] The attraction that the game exercises on the player lies in this risk. One enjoys a freedom of decision which at the same time is endangered and irrevocably limited.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 106. 147 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 106. 148 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 23. 149 “Play is really limited to presenting itself. […] First and foremost, play is self-presentation.”

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 108. 150 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 103. 151 “Only because play is always presentation is human play able to make representation itself the task of a game.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 108.


‘presentation’ can become a ‘representation’ for someone else.152 With play as

performance or theatre, in particular, this representation ‘opens out’ the closed world of

play, letting down one of its walls so that it can be seen by an audience. This ‘opening’

allows the audience to be drawn into the play, becoming more than mere spectators;

becoming, in fact, those in whom the play is played.153 The engagement of the audience in

the play can also be understood from the origin of play as festival or ceremony. The

purpose of any religious ceremony is to invoke the presence of gods through imitation, using

dance, costume, song, and ritual. The ‘play’ of festival makes visible that which is invisible,

bringing to presence otherwise absent gods, forming a narrative that provides a meaningful

whole for those present.154 The ontological shift from the players to the play means that the

participants give themselves over to the rite or festival, forgoing the distinction between

individuals in favour of the identity and meaning available through community.155 Festivals,

ceremonies, and rites are what bring communities together.156

Seen as play or festival, art reveals a mode of interpretation that depends upon the

active engagement of the viewer with the work.157 This is made possible by the separation

of the work from the play through which it is brought to presence. In the play of art, the

phenomenon of excess is manifest in the resultant work. Art is a ‘practical’ form of

knowing, through which the work becomes ‘separated’ from the activity involved in its

making.158 In art, as in play, something comes into presence that has never been there

152 “All presentation is potentially a representation for someone.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 108. 153 “A complete change takes place when play as such becomes a play. It puts the spectator in the place of the player. He–and not the player–is the person for and in whom the play is played.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 110. 154 “The presentation of a god in a religious rite, the presentation of a myth in a play, are play not only in the sense that the participating players are wholly absorbed in the presentational play and find it in their heightened self-representation, but also in that the players represent a meaningful whole for an audience.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 109. 155 “If there is one thing that pertains to all festive experiences, then it is surely the fact that they allow no separation between one person and another. A festival is an experience of community and represents community in its most perfect form. A festival is meant for everyone.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, edited by Robert Bernasconi, translated by Nicholas Walker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 39. 156 “A procession as part of a religious rite is more than a spectacle, since its real meaning is to embrace the whole community.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 109. 157 “It should also be true of the play of art that there is in principle no radical separation between the work of art and the person who experiences it.” Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 28. 158 “What is common to the craftsman’s producing and the artist’s creating, and what distinguished such knowing from theory or from practical knowing or deciding is that a work becomes separated from the activity.” Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 12.


before; the work is made present, presented, through play. This emergence of the work

Gadamer describes as a ‘transformation into structure.’ He writes:

“I call this change, in which human play comes to its true consummation in being art, transformation into structure. […] Only now does it emerge as detached from the representing activity of the players and consist in the pure appearance (Erscheinung) of what they are playing. As such the play […] is in principle repeatable and hence permanent. It has the character of a work, of an ergon and not only of energeia. In this sense I call it a structure (Gebilde).”159

The nature of art as presentation (or representation) is further elaborated through the

concept of symbol. Against the belief in art as an unconscious product of genius inherited

from Kant, Gadamer invokes the original, metonymic, meaning of symbol as an object

whose presence corresponds to something absent, something of which it is a part. This

originates in the Greek use of symbol to denote the tessera hospitalis, or token of

remembrance (‘hospitality shard’). The tessera was that half of an object (usually a fired

clay piece) broken in two by a host and given to his guest, while keeping the other piece for

himself. Many years later, if the guest or a member of his family should return to the house,

the pieces could be fitted together to form a whole, serving as an act of recognition. A

symbol thus provides a means of recognition for something already familiar, but long distant

from experience.160 Gadamer also relates the idea of symbol to Plato’s story in the

Symposium, where Aristophanes describes humans as spherical creatures who were

punished for their misbehaviour by being cut in two by the gods. These fragmentary

creatures wander the world longing for completion, seeking to be made whole again by

finding their corresponding half. The experience of love is one way in which the longing

arising from fragmentation can be overcome, replaced instead by a feeling of wholeness.

Taken together, these reveal symbol as a fragment, an object whose meaning is derived

both from the sensory experience of its material presence, as well as from that which is

denoted by its absence. A symbol is thus a fragment that invokes unity. This applies not

only to the object, but also to the events associated with it. In this way a symbol also

159 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 110. 160 “In its original technical sense, the symbol represented something like a sort of pass used in the ancient world: something in and through which we recognize someone already known to us.” Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 31.


inspires a feeling of wholeness, promising to overcome the experience of fragmentation. A

symbol connects immediate sensory experience to distant objects or events not by referring

to them, but by taking part in them. By invoking wholeness, symbols helps to overcome the

fragmentary nature of experience, connecting events together into a comprehensible whole.

Through symbol, the meaning of events is also placed in a broader social context in which

they occur. A symbol gives meaning to shared experience, to events which bring people

together into a community. A symbol is thus a tangible manifestation of the identity of that

community, a means by which members of a community are able to recognise each other.161

Interpreted as play, festival, and symbol, Gadamer reveals art as far more than the

product of genius.162 Instead art is seen as a form of self-presentation, through which what

was not previously there is able to ‘come to presence’ or ‘present itself.’ This relates to the

original Greek notion of ‘mimesis’ not as imitation but as bringing something to presence or

enabling it to appear. What is brought to presence, according to Gadamer, is ‘Being.’ Art

thus constitutes a bridge between Being and appearance, a metonymic expression of the

relationship between beings and Being. Since what emerges in this way is necessarily

fragmented or broken, art also constitutes a ‘counterplay’ of revealing and concealing.163 A

work of art is ‘there,’ at the same time as it allows what is not there to present itself.164

Because its meaning lies beyond itself, a work of art resists interpretation, or alternatively,

can be interpreted inexhaustibly, precisely because it is indeterminate.165 The purpose of

art, for Gadamer, is to convey meaning that is otherwise inaccessible, to make available an

experience of wholeness through the medium of the fragment.166

161 “Symbol […] is not limited to the sphere of the logos, for a symbol is not related by its meaning, but its own sensory existence has a ‘meaning.’ As something shown, it enables one to recognise something else, as with the tessera hospitalis and the like. Obviously a symbol is something which has its value not only because of its content, but because to can be ‘produced’–i.e., because it is a document by means of which the members of a community recognize one another”. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 172-73. 162 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, pp. 3-53. 163 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 33. 164 “In its irreplaceability, the work of art is no mere bearer of meaning – as if the meaning could be transferred to another bearer. Rather the meaning of the work lies in the fact that it is there. […] The symbolic does not simply point toward a meaning, but rather allows that meaning to present itself. The symbol represents meaning.” Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, pp. 33-34. 165 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 74-75. 166 “In the case of the symbol, […] the particular represents itself as a fragment of being that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it. Or, indeed, the symbol is that other fragment that has always been sought in order to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life. […] the


This hermeneutic conception of the fragment has also been explored by Dalibor

Vesely.167 For Vesely, the concern for fragmentation as a source of isolation, disintegration,

and potential chaos arises as a consequence of the mathematical view of reality promoted by

the natural sciences. In such a view, the various dimensions of the world can be described

elementally, in a ‘piecemeal’ fashion, through isolated areas of scientific inquiry. Rejecting

the idea of a pre-established harmony of the world, this scientific worldview maintains a

conception of universality only as an aggregation of its parts. In contrast, however, Vesely

suggests an alternative view, appearing within poetry and art, in which fragmentation can in

fact engender a sense of wholeness and contribute to the formation of meaning. This

‘restorative’ or ‘symbolic’ meaning Vesely identifies with the architecture of ‘spoils’

beginning in the Middle Ages, in Renaissance collections of curiosities, or in the Romantic

cult of the ruin.168 In this century, the fragment is also identified with Cubism and

Surrealism, especially in their radical reformulation of space and spatial relations. The

juxtaposition of fragments allows similarities to emerge between ostensibly different objects,

revealing on a deeper level what is common to them.169 The fragments also act as a

metaphor, extending the similarity to the objects from which they originate. Through the use

of fragments, art can be symbolic and restorative, serving to reveal new meanings in the

relation between things. Art, writes Vesely, “[…] can also overcome the limits of its

isolation through a restorative work, by recognizing the presence of the latent world which

waits for articulation.”170

Without adopting this restorative potential of the fragment, the focus upon the body in

recent architecture merely continues the modernist project of seeking understanding of the

whole through strategies of division, partition, and fragmentation.171 This contrasts with the

classical ideal of unity, in which the importance of the whole takes precedence over the

individual parts. Within the hermeneutic reading however, fragmentation and unity are

experience of the beautiful, and particularly the beautiful in art, is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be found.” Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 32. 167 Dalibor Vesely, “Architecture and the Ambiguity of Fragment,” in Robin Middleton (ed.) The Idea of the City, London: Architectural Association, 1996, pp. 108-121. 168 Vesely, “Architecture and the Ambiguity of Fragment,” p. 111. 169 Vesely, “Architecture and the Ambiguity of Fragment,” p. 114. 170 Vesely, “Architecture and the Ambiguity of Fragment,” p. 115.


essential dimensions of the dialectic relationship between part and whole. Transformed into

architecture, the body can act as a symbol, invoking unity through fragmentation, and coming

to presence in built form.

171 Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

Chapter 6 Architectural Bodies

This thesis originated in a consideration of attitudes to the body in Modern architecture,

seeking to account for an apparent discrepancy between intention and outcome. The ways

in which Modernism transformed architecture are by now well known; the use of new

materials, the rejection of ornament, the separation of structure from enclosure, and the

abstractions of form and space. In physical terms, Modern architecture accommodated the

body and its needs, providing levels of comfort and hygiene for all members of society, at a

level previously enjoyed only by the wealthy. In retrospect, this can be seen as part of a

necessary revolution in urban hygiene, introducing facilities and practices in order to prevent

the epidemics that troubled European cities well into the nineteenth century. Yet in spite of

its success in practical terms, Modernism appears to have enjoyed a somewhat limited

acceptance. Its widespread adoption by corporate and industrial institutions worldwide has

been mirrored by a resistance to its use in domestic contexts. In stylistic terms, the cleansing

of architecture of its allusions to memory and tradition through ornament – precisely what

postmodernism sought to reinstate – appears to have been a little too discomforting, thereby

preventing popular acceptance. In Australia, for example, where speculative development

now accounts for more than 95% of all new houses, the majority of these are imbued with

Architectural Bodies 203

some sort of stylistic theme – Georgian, Tuscan, Federation – positing Modernism as a

phase of history that is best forgotten.

Modernism’s lack of popular acceptance suggest that while it provided a high level of

comfort, it did so in purely physical terms, with the resulting representation of the body

difficult to recognise in comparison with its stylised forms. To say that Modernism framed

the body scientifically, as an object of medical observation and attention, is not of course

new. Yet the hygienic concerns of Modernism form an integral part of the long and ongoing

tradition of anthropomorphism, of using the body as a source of architectural form. What

that tradition reveals is that the body is a central linking term through which knowledge from

various fields is brought to bear upon architecture. In this way, the complex set of

understandings and interpretations of the body as both a natural and cultural artifact, as a site

of both individual experience and collective customs and practices, can be negotiated

through transformation into built form. Connected to the demonstrations of interior order

inspired by Renaissance anatomy, and back to the origins of ornament in sacrificial ritual, the

discourse on architectural hygiene appears less a matter of fashion than as one more instance

of efforts to come to terms with the interior workings of the body, and to render them visible

on the surface. In contrast, later explorations of the body as lived provide a model of

interiority unaccounted for by anatomical inquiry. The intention here is not to promote a

model of identity as subjectively determined, but to illustrate how the transformation of lived

experience into architectural form is an essential part of the cultural constitution of the body.

While these comparisons have made for a rather broad trajectory in historical terms, they

have revealed a consistent need to deal with dualities of embodiment, rather than attempting

to resolve them by focussing exclusively on one or other polarity. In this way, architecture

acts to mediate between culturally-constituted and lived subjectivity, resulting, as it were,

from a double determination of intrinsic and extrinsic forces. By negotiation of these various

dualities –part and whole, unity and fragmentation, living and dead, object and text, surface

and depth – architecture can be given meaning through its relation to lived experience.

Review

In Chapter Two, the role of body in architecture was seen to originate in efforts to

capture the soul or spirit that connected physical and spiritual realms. Through sacrifice, the


life force found in bodies was thought to be transferred to buildings, a demonstration of their

right to ‘take place’ in the world.1 Like Melville’s Polynesian mariner Queequeg, patterns

used to mark the body initially described a relation between heaven and earth, providing a

navigational aid for movement between the two. Taken from the body, the markings used to

decorate buildings reiterate the correct relationship between objects and the world. Based

on ideals of bodily form, ornament such as a column makes visible an ideal body, promoting

the adoption of natural order within society. During the Renaissance, this role of ornament

continued in the principle of decorum, allowing each person’s position in the social order to

be demonstrated. Through decorum, buildings are able to reflect the relation of the body to

society, a relation sanctioned by the Vitruvian ideal of bodily order. This social function is

emphasised by Francesco di Giorgio’s description of the ‘well-composed’ body as the

source of all art and reason in architecture. At the same time, however, changes to the

understanding of the body were taking place, part of the broader challenge to religious

authority by those who favoured direct methods of investigation. While the effect of

Renaissance science upon architecture is well known in terms of changes to cosmology, the

scientific exploration of the body also influenced architectural anthropomorphism. In fact,

the principles and practices of science that have so often been emulated in architecture

appear to have emerged in large part from anatomical investigation. The dialectic of unity

and fragmentation originating in rituals of sacrifice continued as bodies were dissected to

reveal their inner workings. As investigations of the body became increasingly detailed,

ideas of propriety gradually shifted toward a demonstration of internal order.

In Chapter Three, an understanding of the internal workings of the body was also seen

as central to the organisation of the modern city. Rapid growth resulting from

industrialisation led to new levels of density as cities became crowded with their new labour

force. Epidemics became common, and were only prevented through infrastructure for the

provision of water and the elimination of waste. A nascent understanding of the processes

of contagion combined with a more general olfactory intolerance to lead to new practices of

personal hygiene. The suffusion of urban fabric with plumbing and drainage enabled a new

1 “The artist’s imitation is not making something that looks like something else, but rather something that has a way of being like something else. Houses cannot be required to look like people—that would


level of intimacy with water, resulting in a redefinition of individual space. Architects

responded to the introduction of water not only by designing spaces for cooking, cleaning

and bathing, but by making architecture that conformed to standards of cleanliness. The

cleansing of architectural surface using whitewash and glass enabled architects to take part in

the revolution of urban health during the nineteenth century, and to enjoy some of the

prestige afforded their counterparts in medicine. Buildings, like bodies, became transparent

to the gaze of professionals in the interest of the health of the city.

Along with the prevention of disease, a great deal of medical research in the nineteenth

century sought to provide explanations of sensory experience. In Chapter Four, these

studies were seen to form part of the then emergent science of psychology, reflecting an

interest in exploring the depths of the mind. The study of sensations was an important means

to overcome Cartesian dualism, and the resultant division between inner and outer worlds.

These studies also provided substance for explanations of aesthetic experience. The theory

of empathy, originated by Vischer and later adopted by Wölfflin, portrayed objects as an

expression of the sentience of their maker. An empathic accord between the body and

objects it experiences is possible only because they are made of the same basic matter. This

correspondence also provided the basis of phenomenological critiques of science, calling

into question descriptions of the world that failed to acknowledge the body’s role within it.

For Merleau-Ponty in particular, the world is not something to be viewed, but something to

be actively engaged in, ‘projecting’ ourselves into the world in the course of our endeavours,

or projects. Touch, not vision, thus becomes the paradigmatic sense. While this gives rise

to the possibility of architecture that celebrates sensory experience, it also requires

acknowledgement of the extent to which projects are shared with others. The world we go

out into is as much a social world as a physical one, with projects often entailing working in

common to deal with common needs. Recognising the role of the body in shared projects

and practices necessitates an understanding of identity as beyond the determination of any

one person. With communitarian notions of identity, the self is understood as socially or

intersubjectively determined, as each person’s engagement with others is interpreted through

narrative. In metaphoric terms, this reinforces the idea of double determination, with surface

clearly be absurd; instead they need to ‘occupy a place in the world’ analogous to the way that persons take their place in it.” Rykwert, The Dancing Column, p. 385.


as a register of both internal and external forces. Further, it suggests an architecture that is

able to contribute to narratives of identity, an expression of the memory and imagination of

its inhabitants. In particular, it emphasises the importance of architecture as

commemoration, a narrative of pain and loss suffered on behalf of the community.

In Chapter Five, pain was also seen as an essential part of the dialect of unity and

fragmentation revealed through a hermeneutic reading of the body. In simple terms, pleasure

and pain are opposites that serve to enhance or detract from the sensation of bodily unity.

Pleasure is welcomed by the body, giving an experience of completion or fullness, while pain

is experienced as alien or other, a threat to the stability of the body, and so a threat to order.

In the sublime, however, pain and pleasure are revealed not as opposites, but as connected,

in a dialectic that determines the limits of the body. Pain may be risked or endured in order

to increase the feeling of aliveness, by expanding the limits of bodily sensation. The dialectic

of part and whole thus begins with the body, in sensations that are both fragmentary and

integrative. In the making of artifacts, that dialectic extends outward into the realm of

objects. By transforming interior sensations into exterior artifacts, they can be given a

permanence and an objectivity that implies or promises unity. Like strategies of narrative or

ritual, the making of artifacts can give meaning to fragmentary experience, and allows that

experience to be shared. Through the making of artifacts, however, the dialectic of

fragmentation and unity is also played out in the exchange between interior and exterior

occurring across the boundary of the body. Artifacts extend the powers of the body,

making up for its absences or deficiencies, compensating for its lack of unity. Yet in doing

so, they shift the focus of attention outward and away from the body, bringing about a

disembodiment. Artifacts, in their ability to ease or prevent aversive sensation, direct

attention away from the body, making the body itself no longer an object of attention. The

body is turned ‘inside-out,’ its interior sensations projected onto the world of objects, their

objectivity absorbed into the body. By diverting attention away from the body, artifacts can

give rise to further forms of fragmentation, through which the body is affected by feelings of

disembodiment, alienation, or fetishisation. Alternatively, artifacts can focus attention toward

the body manifesting inner sensations, and enabling us, as with Lacan’s mirror, to ‘see’

ourselves. What is seen in this way is both familiar and unfamiliar, unified and fragmented,

pleasurable and painful; it is the ‘uncanny’ described by Vidler. These alternatives can be

seen to be manifest in the architectures of modernity and of deconstruction, respectively.


Both, however, are founded upon strategies of fragmentation, and are thus part of the

continuing tradition of finding the meaning of the whole by separating it into parts. Through

the adoption of scientific metaphors, Modernist architects fragmented the body, reducing it

to a series of mechanical functions; later, as deconstructivist architects sought to formulate a

‘post-humanist’ body through the infliction of violence, they were attacking a body already

dead.

In the hermeneutic reading of the relationship between body and objects, unity and

fragmentation are not alternatives, but necessary counterparts. Made objects are not merely

a means to overcome aversive sensation, bringing comfort and pleasure. They are also

symbols, through which the interior states of the body are given presence in the world,

rendering them available for interpretation. As symbols, artifacts are necessarily

fragmentary, a partial presence that invokes what is absent. In doing so they also invoke

unity, since the fragment contains a promise of the whole. What is invoked in this way, what

is ‘re-presented’ in artifacts, are states experienced within the body, which themselves have

no external referent. Moreover, according to Gadamer, what is invoked are also states that

are experienced through the body. For Gadamer, the representative function of artifacts

goes beyond subjective experience. Instead, there occurs an ontological shift of engagement

characterised by play, in which the players lose themselves in play, and allow the play to

present itself. What comes to presence in this way, in the ‘play’ of art, is truth. The

‘transformation into structure’ is a transformation into the true.2 With the shift away from the

subject, play also brings to presence a truth that is beyond the experience of any individual.

Seen as festival, art brings people together to experience that truth in common, forming

identity and meaning as a community. In this way, symbol also overcomes the fragmentation

arising from individual experience, instead representing the community as a whole. By

representing events which bring people together into a community, artifacts are able to act as

symbols, invoking wholeness while acknowledging the fragmentary nature of experience.

This symbolic nature of artifacts is particularly evident with architecture. Firstly,

architecture enables a community to come together by forming a site in which the activities of

2 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 112-113. “[…] the concept of transformation characterizes the independent and superior mode of being of what we call structure. From this viewpoint ‘reality’ is defined as what is untransformed, and art as the raising up (Aufhebung) of this reality into its truth.”


that community can ‘take place.’ Secondly, it is able to represent the effort and suffering

involved in the making of that place. In its permanence and scale, architecture connects

together the members of a community across time as well as space, commemorating those

members of a community who enabled it to come together. A building that can provide

comfort and security becomes a work of architecture only when it mediates between the

pleasure of its use and the effort of its making. In this way architecture connects individual

experience to the experience of others in a community. It represents difficulties faced

together, giving strength to those who would encounter them again. It also demonstrates the

necessary connection between comfort and suffering, between pleasure and pain. In this

way, architecture provides a way to connect the fragmentary nature of individual experience

together into a meaningful whole. Yet its task of doing so is problematised by the ongoing

nature of human experience. The continual redetermination of bodily form in the various

historical periods explored above suggest that any characterization of bodily order is a

temporary solution from which further distortions and fragmentations ensue. While the

simplified formal unity of the body in classical architecture provided meaning in opposition to

the apparent chaos of the world, other models became necessary as perceptions of order

evolved. Thus, at the other end of our historical spectrum, the celebration of fragmentation

in deconstructivist architecture can be seen as a reaction against the limiting effects of an

apparent excess of order. In between these two extremes lies an understanding of

anthropomorphism as a means of interpreting body and building in relation to one other.

The goal is not the representation of the body as such, but of embodied experience, of states

experienced within and through the body. This depends upon an understanding of the body

as more and other than an object, a body liable to sensations of pleasure and pain, capable

of memory and imagination, a body whose limits are continually negotiated through sensory

exchange with the world.3 Through a ‘playful’ search for correspondence between

3 See Paul Hirst, and Penny Woolley, Social Relations and Human Attributes, London and New York: Tavistock, 1982; Nikolas S. Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; and Nikolas S. Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, London; New York: Routledge, 1990. Rose writes: “[T]he questions to be addressed concern not ‘the constitution of the self’ but the linkages established between the human and other humans, objects, forces, procedures, the connection and flows made possible, the becomings and capacities engendered, the possibilities thus foreclosed, the machinic connections formed that produce and channel the relations humans establish with themselves, the assemblages of which they form elements, relays, resources, or forces.” Rose, Inventing Ourselves, p. 182.


experience and objects we are able to come to terms with these changing limits, and

celebrate them in architectural form. The architecture that results is neither pure interiority

nor exteriority, neither unified nor fragmented. It is instead a mutable, adaptable, and

permeable surface, on which are registered a variety of often conflicting forces that together

contribute to lived experience.

Surface

The idea of architecture as surface is explored in Gottfried Semper’s Der Stil, first

published in 1863, in which he identifies architecture’s origins in the processes of textile

production that result from the urge to bind materials together using knots.4 Semper’s work

was inspired in large part by that of biologist Georges Cuvier, whose initiative was to adopt

a classification based on function rather than appearance. According to Semper, the urge to

cover the body extended to the use of textiles to provide shelter from wind and rain, giving

rise not only to divisions of space, but to opportunities for pattern and decoration through

the use of dyes. Semper’s ideas were widely read, and are likely to have influenced the

development of the curtain wall.5 Cuvier’s ideas were further developed by D’Arcy

Wentworth Thompson, whose studies of morphology were frequently cited by Le

Corbusier.

Recent developments in biological morphology have continued to interest architects.

Developments in genetics, especially the identification of DNA and the ongoing project of

mapping the human genome, have provided a new level of understanding of human form and

its evolutionary processes. Computer technology is also providing new ways to map the

human body, especially with the virtual model of the Visible Human Project. In 1993, the

body of executed criminal Joseph Paul Jernigan was frozen, sliced, and digitised, a bizarre

4 Joseph Rykwert, “Semper and the Conception of Style,” in The Necessity of Artifice, London: Academy Editions, 1982, pp. 122-130; Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde, Munich: Bruckman, 1878-1879 (1863). On surface in architecture, see also Christy Anderson and Karen Koehler (eds.) The Built Surface, two volumes, Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, 2001; and David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 5 Rykwert, “Semper and the Conception of Style,” p. 130.


latter-day sacrifice that has created the first truly virtual body. Yet while there are obvious

similarities in the three-dimensional technologies used to describe bodies and buildings, it is

the processes of adaptation and evolution that have proved most influential. In biology,

computational models have been used not simply to describe forms, but to generate them in

relation to processes of growth, response, and decay characteristic of living organisms.

With the resulting ‘new biology,’ form is seen to emerge from complex systems of

information transfer and environmental response. These programs have been directly

applied to architecture, changing the role of the architect from that of generating form to that

of determining the conditions or parameters that are to be used to initiate generative

processes.6

These biological processes depend upon an understanding of surface as a point of

interaction between organism and environment. Yet the study of surface in architecture has

also borrowed the idea of topology from geometry and mathematics. The three-dimensional

computer modelling software used to map complex surfaces and their distortions are used in

mathematics to describe topological similarities and operations. When surfaces can be

distorted, their shape is less relevant than their spatial relationships and connections. A

cube, for example, can be distorted into a cylinder or sphere, but cannot be transformed into

a torus (or doughnut) without introducing new surface connections. Applied to architecture,

topology gives rise to dynamic forms of space that provide an alternative to the infinite and

homogenous space of Cartesian geometry.7 It allows architecture to become involved in

complexity through flexibility.8 This model of architecture as a flexible or pliant surface

differs from earlier explorations of ‘folding’ in architecture.9 Unlike the discontinuous folds

used by Peter Eisenman or Bahram Shirdel, inspired largely by the deconstructivist writings

of Jacques Derrida, the biological models give rise to a surface of continuous differentiation.

The influence of conflicting conditions, rather than being expressed through discontinuity, is

6 Ali Rahim (ed.) Contemporary Techniques in Architecture, Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2002; Bob Fear (ed.) Architecture + Animation, Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2001; Ali Rahim (ed.) Contemporary Processes in Architecture, Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2000. 7 Giuseppa Di Cristina, “The Topological Tendency in Architecture,” In Giuseppa Di Cristina (ed.) Architecture and Science, Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2001, pp. 6-13. 8 Di Cristina, “The Topological Tendency in Architecture,” p. 8. 9 Greg Lynn (ed.) Folding in Architecture, London: Academy Editions, 1993.


instead accommodated via adaptive response, through processes of ‘continuous

transformation’.10

One of the major proponents of this ‘topological’

architecture is Greg Lynn. In various papers and

projects developed over the last decade, Lynn identifies

the possibility of a new kind of architectural body, one

that acknowledges the dynamic interplay of internal and

external forces in the determination of form.11 In

contrast to the static determinacy of classical bodies,

Lynn describes the idea of a ‘multiplicitious’ body, one

whose unity is dependent upon provisional stabilities and

alliances formed between local elements or

particularities. The order of such a body emerges not

from a single, unifying principle, but from a process of

continuous differentiation through which free elements are brought into relation by external

forces or events. Because of multiple possibilities for combining elements, a supple and

flexible order emerges that is able to incorporate vicissitudes and contingencies, resulting in a

provisional order, capable of continuous transformation and mutation.12 The biological basis

of Lynn’s designs is particularly evident in the ‘Embryologic Houses,’ a series of mass-

produced, non-identical repetitive forms made possible by the application of contemporary

manufacturing techniques to architecture.13 Such forms are intended to imitate biological

processes of evolution through genetic variation.

10 Di Cristina, “The Topological Tendency in Architecture,” p. 7. 11 Greg Lynn, “Multiplicitious and Inorganic Bodies,” Assemblage 19, 1992, pp. 32-49; Greg Lynn, “Body Matters,” in Andrew Benjamin (ed.) The Body. London; Berlin: Academy Editions; Ernst and Sohn, 1993, pp. 60-69. Both articles appear in Greg Lynn, Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays. Brussels: La Lettre Volee, 1998. 12 Lynn, “Body Matters,” p. 62-65. 13 Greg Lynn, “Embryologic Houses,” In Ali Rahim (ed.) Contemporary Processes in Architecture, Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2000, pp. 26-35.

Greg Lynn, Embryologic Houses.

Image: Greg Lynn.


The imitation of biological processes of adaptive response in the generation of

architectural form is one of many aspects of the application of computer technology to

architecture. As a technology of both vision and thought, computers are certain to

reconfigure the relationship between architecture and the body, as they affect everything

from sensory experience to manufacturing techniques. The change to architectural

representation alone is of a scale not seen since the birth of printing during the

Renaissance.14 Of particular interest is the prospect of disembodiment entailed by virtual

reality.15 In the present thesis, however, such issues have been avoided in order to focus on

the continued question of embodiment, and the way this is given meaning through projection

into architecture.

Lynn’s work, for example, while originating in scientific models such as D’Arcy

Thompson’s work on biological form or Elias Canetti’s study of crowds,16 are also heavily

influenced by the philosophical writings of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This influence

comes in part from psychological themes of the body as a medium of experience, not an

object: what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “body without organs”.17 It also comes

14 Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory, translated by Sarah Benson, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 1-15. 15 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: essays on virtual and real space, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001; Jennifer Whyte, Virtual Reality and the Built Environment, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2002; John Beckmann (ed.) The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. 16 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1984. 17 “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1987, pp.149-166.

Greg Lynn, Embryologic

House, prototype. Image:

Greg Lynn.


from Deleuze’s study of Baroque aesthetics, of ‘folding’ as a metaphor of conceptual

thought.18 Various authors have sought to interpret these themes in architecture, including

Bernard Cache and John Rajchman.19 Principles of ‘folding’ can be identified in a range of

architectural projects, from the complex forms of Frank Gehry’s architecture to the

exploration of ‘hypo-surface’ by Mark Goulthorpe and dECOi.20 Significant projects

include the Möbius House in Het Gooi, Netherlands, 1993-97, by Ben van Berkel and

Caroline Bos of UN-Studio21 (based on the Möbius Strip, a continuous surface with no

differentiation between inside and outside), and the recently completed Yokohama

International Port Terminal in Japan by Foreign Office Architects. Explorations in

architectural surface can also be found in recent Australian architecture. In Melbourne’s

Federation Square project by Lab Architecture Studio in association with Bates Smart, the

so called ‘fractal façade’ of nested triangular geometries is delicately folded and fractured to

create dynamic surface modulations. In the work of Lyons Architects, such as the Box Hill

Institute of Tafe or the Victoria University Online Training Centre at St. Albans in

Melbourne, layers of materials and printed images are used to create a semblance of

materiality on an otherwise flat surface.

In many of these projects, the notion of ‘force’ is interpreted primarily in physical or

biological terms, with various influences identified as ‘attractors’ which give rise to

deformations of building fabric. Instead of allowing outward appearance to be determined

solely by internal conditions, a common aim of Modernism,22 such architecture also

responds to external features or conditions, such as landmarks or circulations routes. For

Australian architects, eager to overcome inherited architectural traditions, the external

condition most often invoked is that of climate or landscape. Notable examples occur in the

work of architects such as Glen Murcutt or Greg Burgess, with their celebration of

18 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 19 Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, translated by Anne Boyman, edited by Michael Speaks, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1995; John Rajchman, Constructions, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. 20 “dECOi: aegis hyposurface, autoplastic to alloplastic,” Architectural Design 69/9-10 (Sept.-Oct. 1999), pp.60-65. 21 Ben van Berkel, Mobile Forces, edited by Kristin Feireiss, Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1994.


landscape in its rural or indigenous forms. In urban contexts, ideas of landscape are also

invoked, with Lab’s Federation Square in Melbourne positing nature as the principal source

of architectural order, while Lyons Architects regard the various interpretations of nature in

science and art as a ‘cultural landscape’ that can be represented in architecture. This idea of

a cultural landscape could also be seen to inform celebrations of urban or suburban life in

Australian architecture, especially in the work of architects Edmund and Corrigan.23

The response to enculturated forms of exteriority indicates that the conception of force

as purely physical is insufficient for architecture. Indeed any response to an external force

must be seen as part of the social and temporal extensions of identity characterised by

hermeneutics. To acknowledge external forces is to engage in an ongoing process of

incorporation, while any response is part of an ongoing process of objectification. A force

can never be regarded as a single, atemporal event, since its interpretation makes it part of

the shared social practices in which architecture operates. In other words, the very act of

response is an essential part of the double determination of architecture, as it is given

meaning through mediation between internal and external forces.

The idea of double determination can be

seen in the work of Melbourne architect

Kerstin Thompson. The celebration of

sensory experience is a common theme in

Thompson’s work, from the crunch of gravel

underfoot in the Webb Street house to the

curious ‘Bleat’ printed on the Hallam Bypass

sound walls.24 In other projects, especially

the Napier Street Housing in Melbourne’s

Fitzroy, the play of light and material is

22 See Thomas L. Schumacher, “‘The Outside is the Result of an Inside’: Some Sources of One of Modernism’s Most Persistent Doctrines,” Journal of Architectural Education, 56/1 (September 2002): pp. 23-33. 23 Conrad Hamann, Cities of Hope: Australian Architecture and Design by Edmond and Corrigan, 1962-1992, Melbourne; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 24 Goad, Philip, New Directions in Australian Architecture, edited by Patrick Bingham-Hall, Balmain, N.S.W.: Pesaro Publishing, 2001.

Figure 28:Kerstin Thompson Architects,

Napier Street Housing, Fitzroy, Victoria.

Photo: Patrick Bingham Hall.


carefully constructed in relation to both the domestic and industrial forms of the surrounding

suburb.25 The reinterpretation of local forms and materials shows an effort to respect the

history and tradition of this working class suburb even in the course of its gentrification. The

relation between program and context evident in each of these projects is described though

the concept of ‘gradient architecture.’26 Through ‘gradient’ architecture, Thompson seeks

to emphasise the conditions between traditional opposites, such as light and dark, private

and public, inside and outside, architecture and landscape. By highlighting gradations of

light, privacy, or enclosure, boundaries between opposites are dissolved, and are instead

revealed as interstitial conditions in a field of continuous transformation. The result is a

‘differentiated whole’ achieved not as an aggregate of distinct parts but as a continuum of

sensory qualities experienced through movement. This is an architecture that mediates

between modes of occupation, between the space of inhabitation and the broader social and

cultural context in which it occurs. It is a mediation that is formal as well as experiential,

connecting inside and outside through both symbolism and sensory experience.

Such connections may be seen as little more than contextual references necessary to

satisfy planning regulations. Alternatively, they can be seen as an effort to provide continuity

to the narrative identity invested in architecture. While a rich local context simplifies this

task, it does so because it overcomes the discontinuity caused by modernism’s attempt to

deny the temporality of architecture. Instead of conceiving of the body in objective terms,

architecture must respond to the modes of identity that determine its inhabitation, to in turn

play a part in the determination of that identity. Only through an awareness of embodiment,

in its ever changing forms is architecture able to contribute to this ongoing project, and give

life and meaning to built space.

25 Shane Murray, “Medium Density,” Architecture Australia 91/2 (Mar.-Apr 2002), pp. 50-55. 26 Kerstin Thompson “Gradient Architecture,” Architecture Australia, 90/3 (May-June 2001): pp. 66-71.

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